LOS ANGELES _ A jury Friday recommended the death penalty for Michael Gargiulo, the serial killer convicted of murdering two women and nearly killing a third who were his neighbors in the Los Angeles area.
The jury deliberated for several hours over three days in the penalty phase of a sensational trial that featured testimony from actor Ashton Kutcher and gruesome descriptions of the slayings carried out by a man dubbed the "Hollywood ripper" and the "boy next door killer" for his proximity to his victims.
Prosecutors depicted Gargiulo, 43, as a savvy predator capable of discerning the rules of society and making it appear he was living within them even as he was breaking into homes at night to threaten, brutalize and murder women.
Gargiulo was "well-groomed, fit, attractive," Deputy District Attorney Garrett Dameron said earlier this week during closing statements. "A businessman. Employed. Friends. Family. A child. A normal life by day _ and at night, a completely different individual."
But his attorneys argued that Gargiulo was a battered, neglected child who grew into an antisocial man beset with severe mental illness.
While mental illness doesn't excuse Gargiulo's crimes, Daniel Nardoni, one of his attorneys, told jurors this week that it should be taken into account when deciding whether he should be executed.
"It's inhumane to execute a mentally ill person," Nardoni said. "In our society, our great society, we don't condemn to death our mentally ill."
In August, the same jury found that Gargiulo was legally sane when he murdered Ashley Ellerin in 2001 and Maria Bruno in 2005, as well as when he tried to murder Michelle Murphy in 2008.
Gargiulo met Ellerin, 22, after helping her change a flat tire. An air-conditioner repairman, Gargiulo offered to fix Ellerin's heater and began showing up uninvited at her home.
Her body was found in her apartment with 47 stab wounds in February 2001, her throat slashed so deeply she was nearly decapitated. Kutcher had been set to go out on a date with Ellerin that night and testified as to how she didn't answer her door or his calls.
Bruno, 32, was killed in her El Monte apartment in December 2005. Gargiulo, who lived in the same complex, stabbed Bruno, cut off her breasts and tried to remove her breast implants, prosecutors said.
Her estranged husband, Irving Bruno, told the jury last week he didn't immediately tell his four children _ ages 2 through 5 at the time _ that their mother was dead.
But "ultimately," Bruno said, breaking into tears, "I had to divulge the information that their mother had been killed, that she would no longer be present in their lives."
As he spoke, Gargiulo stuffed a finger in his ear as if to block out Bruno's words.
Gargiulo was also found guilty of trying to murder Murphy. In April 2008, Murphy testified that after falling asleep for about an hour in her Santa Monica apartment, she woke up to a man straddling her in the dark, wordlessly stabbing her in the arms and chest.
Murphy managed to fight off her attacker, who yelled "I'm sorry!" as he ran out the door, she said.
Prosecutor Dameron said the violence Gargiulo wreaked on women was the "tapestry, if you will, of his life," describing a string of killings, rapes, threats and assaults that Dameron said Gargiulo committed across a 15-year period.
Nardoni, Gargiulo's attorney, outright begged the jury not to condemn to death a man he described as the mentally ill product of a family that showed him nothing but abuse, cruelty and, finally, abandonment.
"Sometimes," Nardoni said, "violence breeds violence."
Last week, a psychologist who interviewed Gargiulo's father and most of his six siblings described a train of abuse that began with 2-year-old Michael Gargiulo being hogtied with his father's neckties and left in a closet for days.
His hands were held over a stove top until they blistered, and his father hit him in the head with a baseball bat and a golf club, the psychologist, Vianne Castellano, said. Knowing Michael's fondness for animals, his siblings tied the boy to a stump in the backyard and made him watch as they blew up hamsters, gerbils and cats with M-80 firecrackers, Castellano said.
Gargiulo stared ahead, expressionless, as the psychologist described him being ridiculed by his family as "the weak link, the sissy-boy, the designated whipping boy of the family."
Castellano, who interviewed Gargiulo for 300 hours, said he has no memory of the abuse or of his childhood at all. His memory begins when he left home at 18, she testified.
Prosecutors assailed Castellano's credibility, pointing out her handwritten notes from interviews with Gargiulo's relatives contain virtually no mention of the abuse she said he suffered.
Pressed by Deputy District Attorney Dan Akemon, Castellano acknowledged that while notes from her interview with Gargiulo's father, Eugene, don't mention him clubbing an adolescent Michael with a baseball bat, they do reference Michael throwing his father through a window.
Last week, Gargiulo's legal team called their last witness.
A boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt took the stand. He was nervous, and stammered when the clerk swore him in.
"Who's that gentleman at the end of the table?" one of the lawyers asked.
He locked eyes with Gargiulo. Gargiulo smiled. The boy smiled back, and began to cry.
"That's my dad."
Andrew Gargiulo, now 16 and a junior in high school, was 5 years old when his father was arrested in June 2008, two months after the assault on Murphy.
Andrew said he grew up believing his father worked in a foreign country. When Gargiulo wrote him letters from jail, his mother told him the letters had come from overseas, he said. He learned his father was in custody when he was 10 years old.
"I don't see a psychopath," he told the jury. "I don't see a murderer. All I see is my dad, and I would like him to still be alive so I can talk to him."
Dameron, the prosecutor, said Andrew Gargiulo is yet another victim of his father's crimes.
"When his son was 2, where was he? He was standing over Maria Bruno, removing her breasts," Dameron said.
While Gargiulo's son was able to plead for his parent's life, Dameron said, "Maria Bruno's children didn't get that chance."
