Inside the truck were two Marines who listened in horror as she described her ordeal. “They were really mad,” she recalled. “They said they were going to kick his ass. They started driving as fast as they could, trying to catch him.” The blue car sped off into the distance. Asbenson was treated for her injuries and gave a statement to Riverside County Sheriff’s detectives, but they were unable to locate the car or its driver.
NEARLY FIVE YEARS LATER and more than 2,000 miles away, Officer Warren Fryer of the Hammond, Indiana, Police Department received an emergency call from a security guard at the American Inn, a run-down motel in the working-class suburb 30 minutes east of Chicago. According to the guard, two guests, a man and a woman, were arguing in the motel parking lot.
It was April 1, 1997. Fryer, who was on routine patrol that evening, drove to the motel. As he got out of his car, he immediately recognized the woman mentioned by the guard: Patricia Kelly, a local prostitute Fryer had arrested in the past. Apparently, she had just stolen a personal check from her client while they were having sex in their motel room, and the john was angry, chasing her around the parking lot, demanding she return it, which she couldn’t do because she had flushed it down the toilet. Fryer also recognized the john. He was a Chicago security guard and former Marine named Andrew Urdiales.
Some five months earlier, on November 14, 1996, Fryer had arrested Urdiales outside a crack house on Becker Street in Hammond. Urdiales had been sitting in his silver-and-white Toyota pickup with a prostitute. While Fryer talked to the prostitute, his partner, Edwin Ortiz, was questioning Urdiales when he noticed a .38 caliber handgun sticking out from under his seat. They also found a gym bag in the spotless bed of the truck containing a few rolls of duct tape. Urdiales said he used the gun for his security work, but the cops arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. They confiscated the gun, and Urdiales spent the night in jail.
At the American Inn, Urdiales was standing in the parking lot, seething. “That bitch took one of my checks,” he told Fryer, who then questioned Kelly separately. She told him that Urdiales, a regular client, would routinely drive her to nearby Wolf Lake and pay her $40 to have sex with him. But that was always during the day, and tonight, she’d refused to go with him because it was dark. Not only that, but she also knew a couple of prostitutes who’d been murdered at Wolf Lake late at night.
“This guy is kind of kinky,” Kelly told Fryer. “He wants to take me in the back of his pickup truck and go up by Wolf Lake, duct tape me, and fuck me in the ass.”
Fryer made no arrests that night, but he typed up a report on Kelly’s statement, making sure to note Urdiales’ previous firearm arrest—knowing full well that it would be forwarded to other local police departments. He figured a couple of Chicago homicide detectives might be interested in what Kelly had to say.
ONE OF THOSE DETECTIVES, Don McGrath, still works nights for Chicago’s Area Two Homicide Unit, which covers the southeast portion of the city. He’s been with the force 31 years; so far this year, his unit has handled 135 murder investigations. But he still remembers well the night in April 1997 when he read Fryer’s report because it seemed to have everything to do with three bodies that had been found in the previous year, two in Wolf Lake and one in the Vermilion River 100 miles away near Pontiac, Illinois.
Although it was out of his jurisdiction, McGrath was familiar with the Vermilion case. On the evening of July 13, 1996, three young fishermen spotted a body floating in a remote area of the river near a footbridge. It was a nude woman who had been shot above her left eye and stabbed seven times in the chest. She had bruises all over, three broken teeth, duct-tape residue on her mouth and ankles, and strangulation marks on her neck. She also had a small, homemade tattoo on her ankle with the initials “C.C.” Police later identified her as 21-year-old Cassandra Corum, a prostitute from Hammond.
As McGrath saw it, Corum’s murder seemed awfully similar to the murders his unit had been investigating at Wolf Lake, a recreational park bordered on the southeast side of Chicago by a chemical plant. The first body had been discovered on April 14, 1996, when a man was driving along the shore, looking for rocks to use as decoration in his garden. From his car, he spotted what looked like a mannequin floating in the water 20 feet from shore.
Police determined the victim was Laura Uylaki, a 25-year-old Hammond prostitute, who had been stabbed 25 times and shot three times in the head. She had been raped anally, and her body was covered in bruises.
A few months later, on August 2, a Chicago city employee was coming home after an early-morning fishing trip with his son, when he spotted what he thought was a mannequin floating in the water. It turned out to be Lynn Huber, a 22-year-old homeless prostitute from Chicago who had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, back and neck, and then finished off with close-range gunshots to the face and head. The bullets matched those which had been retrieved from the bodies of Corum and Uylaki.
When he read Fryer’s report about Urdiales, McGrath immediately called the Hammond police and learned that the handgun that had been confiscated from Urdiales was scheduled to be destroyed in the next few weeks. “I asked would it be okay to pick up the gun and examine it,” he recalls. “We brought it to the crime lab, and it took them about a week to analyze it. They said we had the murder weapon.”
ON APRIL 22, 1997, McGrath and his partner Raymond Krakausky drove to the house on the south side of Chicago where Urdiales lived with his parents. They sat in their car from early that afternoon until 9 a.m. the following day, when Urdiales walked out the front door dressed in a security-guard uniform. “We snagged him in the alley and told him we wanted to talk to him about the handgun charge,” McGrath says. “He said that the matter had already been adjudicated, but he agreed to come with us to the station. He was unremarkable. There was nothing about him that stood out, that would make you look twice, just an average-looking Joe.”
McGrath began his interrogation with a casual chat about Star Trek. Both he and Urdiales happened to be fans of the show, and McGrath was impressed that Urdiales could quote from the series.
McGrath and Krakausky already had a suspect in mind for the murders, a man who knew all three prostitutes, who had failed a polygraph and then tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists.
“He was an evil guy,” McGrath says of their suspect. “Evil incarnate, deep-set eyes, disheveled hair, a Charlie Manson expression, and in my 32 years, I never had the sense of evil like when I talked to this guy, but we couldn’t find any physical evidence to connect him. We kind of believed Urdiales acquired his gun from this guy or loaned it to the guy, and he was the guy we were looking for.”
At the station, however, Urdiales insisted he had purchased the gun from a dealer, still had the receipts, kept the gun locked in a box in his basement, and nobody else had the keys. McGrath and Krakausky exchanged glances and informed Urdiales that his gun had been used to murder three prostitutes. Urdiales unpinned his security-guard badge and untied his shoelaces. “I guess I’m not going to be going to work today,” he said, and then confessed to murdering Uylaki, Corum and Huber.
Urdiales described the murders in detail: how he lured them to Wolf Lake for sex but got angry each time. He shot Uylaki after she saw his gun under his seat and tried to grab it. He then removed her clothes, stabbed her and dumped her in the lake. Huber met the same fate after she acted “ditzy” in his car. He grabbed her by the hair, then shot her when she tried to leave and dumped her in the water.
Corum, according to McGrath’s notes of the interview, said “something that pissed him off,” so Urdiales hit her in the face, took off her clothes and used duct tape to tie her feet together. He also taped her mouth shut, but he took off the tape to let her smoke a cigarette while he drove down Interstate 55 toward the Vermilion River. He pulled off the freeway near a farmhouse, driving through cornfields to the river.
Once there, he untied Corum, marched her out of the car, shot and stabbed her, then dro
pped her from a footbridge into the river. “Andrew Urdiales states that he didn’t feel anything for Cassie after he shot her,” McGrath wrote. “That she was just a whore. And he was trained to kill in the Marine Corps.”
Urdiales didn’t stop there. After confessing to the three Illinois murders, he told McGrath to call the cops in California.
“There are things they’d like to talk to me about, too,” he explained.
McGrath took furious notes as Urdiales recited a list of horrific murders in California. “It seemed he was glad to get it off his chest,” McGrath recalls. “During the recounting of the incidents, we’d crack a couple of jokes, and he’d laugh and go on to tell us about somebody else he killed. Pretty bizarre.”
In 1987, Urdiales said, he’d picked up a prostitute (later revealed to be Mary Ann Wells) in an industrial neighborhood of San Diego. He paid her $40 for sex, then shot her and took his money back. The next year, he returned to San Diego and murdered a woman police identified as Julie McGhee, a 20-year-old prostitute. In 1989, he murdered another prostitute, 19-year-old Tammie Erwin, in Palm Springs. He told McGrath he returned to Palm Springs on at least two other occasions. In 1995, he’d murdered a prostitute named Denise Maney there. And three years earlier, he’d kidnapped and raped a young woman who managed to escape his vehicle.
Within days, police throughout Southern California were matching Urdiales’ description of the murders with their unsolved homicides. Urdiales had also talked about a storage locker in Twentynine Palms, where he served in the Marines after leaving Camp Pendleton. Inside the locker, Riverside County Sheriff’s detectives found several guns, rolls of duct tape, assorted knives and a machete. They also tracked down Jennifer Asbenson and showed her a series of photographs. Without hesitation, she identified Urdiales as the man who had kidnapped and raped her and, after she escaped from his trunk, chased her down the road with a machete.
The last person Urdiales confessed to murdering, as he sat calmly across a desk from McGrath inside the Chicago police station, was Robbin Brandley.
A FEW DAYS LATER, then-Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates paid a surprise visit to Jack and Genelle Reilley at their home in Laguna Beach. An ex-Camp Pendleton Marine named Andrew Urdiales, who was in custody in Chicago, had confessed to murdering their daughter.
“Gates was 6-foot-6 and wore a big hat and boots with a 2-inch heel,” Jack recalls. “He showed up with all these detectives and said this guy had confessed in Chicago to all these murders. It was on CNN and all over the news.”
Gates told the Reilleys he was holding a press conference to announce the Brandley murder case had been solved. “He said Robbin was the first [victim], and we are going to get him here [to stand trial] first,” Jack says. “And after that, it went back to nothing again.”
Getting Urdiales to stand trial in California wouldn’t turn out to be so easy. First, he’d go to court for the three murders in Illinois. The first case finally went to trial in April 2002, five years after Urdiales confessed. The prosecution’s case understandably focused on the three Illinois murders and featured dozens of witnesses: everyone from Patricia Kelly, the prostitute who alerted Hammond police to Urdiales’ sexual proclivities, to Don McGrath, who arrested Urdiales. But the star witness was Jennifer Asbenson, who recounted for the jury in gripping detail her ordeal in the desert at the hands of the accused killer.
Urdiales pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He didn’t testify during the trial. Instead, jurors heard his voice primarily in tape recordings made on April 24, 1997, the day after his arrest, when Orange County Sheriff’s detectives Bob Blackburn and Helen Moreno flew to Chicago and met with him. In his interview, Urdiales described his upbringing in Chicago, how he joined the Marine Corps in 1984, and served at Camp Pendleton before deployments in Okinawa, the Philippines, and California, where he was stationed at Twentynine Palms.
In 1988, Urdiales said, he’d re-enlisted, and the next year, he went back to Okinawa before returning once again to California, and then shipping out to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield. Urdiales served as a radio operator in the Persian Gulf War and received an honorable discharge. After leaving the Marines, he returned to Chicago, visiting California on occasion to visit family members—and, according to his previous confession, murder five women.
He told Blackburn and Moreno that his stint at Camp Pendleton in 1985 was the “best year” of his life, but that things turned sour when all of his buddies were transferred elsewhere in early 1986. Urdiales explained that he had a “rotten temper” and “just couldn’t deal with the new group of people coming in” to the base.
On the night Brandley died, Urdiales claimed, he “got mad with one of the other guys” in his barracks. He just needed to “get off that fucking base.” He drove north along Interstate 5, armed with what he described as a “big ol’ hunting knife” with a serrated edge and hollow grip for survival gear with a compass on the end.
“I just drove around,” he continued. “I notice this sign said Saddleback College, so I stopped, and I just, I parked my car, and we just, uh, uh, just walking [sic]. I had my knife with me. I don’t know why…. So I wandered up, probably, wandered up toward the, uh, college…. It was dark…. No lights, no nothing, just darkness…Maybe I just wanted to just kind of have an idea of what would happen if I just, you know, maybe robbed someone or a mugging or something. Maybe just try, you know, just kinda go on the edge. See what happens. ’Cause I was always trained, always trained to kill in boot camp.”
At this point, Urdiales said, he noticed a woman walking to her car. “No one else was around, just the two of us,” he said. “So I just started walking to her, kinda. And she turned around and looked but didn’t say anything.” Urdiales kept following her. “I think that it became apparent that something was wrong, and she looked around, and then she saw the knife, and then she screamed briefly.”
Urdiales covered her mouth with his hands. He told the detectives that he doesn’t clearly remember what happened next. “It’s just kinda like, just dark, fuzzy,” he said. “It’s kind of like things going on back and forth in my mind just like, yes, no. Do it now.” Urdiales said he told the woman to hand over her purse. She complied, and he placed it on top of the nearest car.
The detectives then asked Urdiales to describe the purse. “I don’t think the purse had nothing to do with that,” he answered. “I think it was her that we wanted, and we just sat there for awhile—I don’t know what happened. The next thing I know is the knife went into her back, once, twice, several times. And I don’t remember, I just don’t remember, just uh, you know, uh, walked away. Wiped the blood off somewhere. I don’t remember where we did.”
After murdering Brandley, Urdiales claimed, he cut his hand jumping a fence, then drove back to Camp Pendleton. The Marines guarding the base entrance noticed blood on his clothes, but Urdiales convinced them he’d injured himself fixing his car. “Those guys are so stupid,” he told the detectives. Urdiales kept his knife for a few weeks and even brought it with him when he took a bus to Hollywood and had sex with a prostitute. “I just had sex, and then I left,” he explained. “Lucky for her.”
When he returned to the base that night, a security guard searched his backpack, found the knife and confiscated it. Thus, the Brandley murder weapon disappeared. Detective Blackburn testified that Orange County Sheriff’s detectives contacted Camp Pendleton and verified he was treated for a hand injury and, a few weeks later, was found in possession of a large knife, which was confiscated.
Because Urdiales repeatedly used the word “we” when describing the Brandley murder, his confession to Blackburn and Moreno became the centerpiece of his defense team’s attempt to convince the jury he was a crazed killer who couldn’t be held responsible for his crimes. His lawyers presented evidence that Urdiales had been counseled for depression at a Veteran’s Administration clinic in Chicago.
“Andrew is a paranoid schizophrenic,” Kathryn Lisco, Urdiales’ court-ap
pointed public defender, told the jury during her closing arguments. “Andrew has brain damage.”
Lisco then launched into a biography of Urdiales that featured repeated injuries as a child, beginning as an infant, when his sister accidentally dropped him on his head. She asserted that he’d been in a car crash when he was a year old, hit his head on a cement step two years later, and then was repeatedly molested by his sister, who in turn had been abused by a family friend. “This went on for several years,” she argued. “He became confused. He became ashamed. He suffered humiliation. And as he grew, this fueled his rage tremendously.”
When Urdiales was a young child, his brother Alfred died in Vietnam. As a result, Lisco argued, his mother “abandoned” him, retreating into her bedroom. Urdiales was bullied throughout high school and joined the Marines to make his family proud. At first, the Marines seemed to provide the discipline and sense of belonging Urdiales lacked at home. But after he was stationed at Camp Pendleton and promoted from private to corporal, Lisco said, he began to lose his nerve—and eventually his mind.
“Andrew begins to hear things in his mind,” she told the jury. “And he doesn’t know exactly what they are. He begins to hear things that he interprets as messages and says that sometimes these messages are in code…. And Andrew begins to go on missions.”
Lisco told the jury that Urdiales’ first “mission” was murdering Brandley. “When he first acted on his delusions and killed Robbin Brandley, he had gone for a drive, nowhere in particular, and at some point, he believed he was on this CIA mission,” she told the jury. “The instructions came to him through his receiver, and he felt that he had a test coming on, and the test was to see if he could kill without any feeling. And this was a secret mission, therefore it’s conducted at night…. He’s looking for his CIA contact. He’s looking for his target of opportunity. He sees the sign for Saddleback College…. That’s where it all started.”
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 26