“The majority of serial killers have disrupted water signs,” he says suddenly, looking more at the potted fig tree as he speaks than at Marisa or me.
“Gargiulo has a Scorpio rising sign, a water Cancer Moon, and Mars opposing his rising,” he continues. Rainn is bald, with a perfectly shaped, round head that he shaves nearly every day and large tribal earrings that stretch his earlobes to the size of a half-dollar. I watch as the light reflects off his taut scalp while I figure out what to say next.
“You did his chart?” I ask. I’m genuinely surprised and not a little touched. The whole thing feels surreal, not to mention somewhat confusing. Had Rainn been listening this whole time when I had thought he just looked bored and out of it? I didn’t even realize that Rainn knew Ashley’s full name, let alone her accused killer’s name. Where had he gone to find his birth date and birthplace, and when had he done all of it? And why?
“I’ve always been really interested in serial killers,” he says, now turning to make eye contact with me. Marisa, strangely, looks uninterested and is not really listening. She’s clearly heard similar conversations dozens of times and is occupying herself with the cocktail list as Rainn talks.
“Using Eastern astrology, a large percentage of serial killers have a strong relationship to Pisces, Cancer, or Scorpio along with a violently placed Mars. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard the Night Stalker all had water moons disrupted by the planet Mars,” he continues. I’m not sure how to take this information, or even figure out what any of it means. My first instinct is to say “That’s fascinating.” But is it? It’s more as though this scene that I have found myself in is fascinating.
At certain times over the past few years and in certain places—say, in a courtroom in Los Angeles, at a waterfall outside Seattle, and later at a strip club in Las Vegas and a hair salon in Pasadena—I had become aware of the notion that I wouldn’t be where I was that very moment if Ashley hadn’t died. Having known her, and having taken this path to understand her death, is the closest thing I’ve come to an out-of-body experience: the floaty sensation of observing the parallel tracks my life could have taken and how a single action long ago has set off a journey that has reverberated for years and will probably stretch on into the future—maybe it will take me to places I can’t even conceive of yet, a mountaintop or a foreign graveyard or maybe even a prison cell. And here, sitting in the immaculate courtyard of this iconic Hollywood hotel, politely listening to a lunar astrologer wax on about famous serial killers’ astrological charts and realizing that what I consider to be a pseudoscience has some relevance to my life, is one of those times.
“A disrupted water sign indicates a person who has so much emotion that he ends up shutting his emotions off entirely to try to deal with his life,” Rainn says. Marisa has ordered a drink while Rainn is talking—a mojito—and now she’s turned back toward us and is regarding Rainn from the side, almost in the way of coed talk-show hosts bent on maintaining traditional gender roles. “It’s funny: you hear serial killers say that they have no emotion at all, but according to astrology, their emotions are so disrupted or disturbed that their crimes are really about finding violent ways to express the emotions that they very much do have. Gargiulo’s alignment creates relentless feelings of violence that would be difficult to contain.” Restless feelings of violence. I consider this: the way restlessness feels in the body, an ache, a tingling, a buzzy anxious heat. I feel restless myself right now. Restless for meaning. Restless for clarity. Restless to know how it will all turn out.
What do restless feelings of violence feel like? Have I ever had them? My mind jumps to picturing an angry little boy in a sandbox, unable to express himself, so instead he throws first sand, and his shovel, and then his pail. I picture Gargiulo alone in his apartment before any of the killings went down. Would he have been someone to torture dogs? Or cut himself repeatedly? What might it have been like to enter his apartment? Would the energy have scared me, like the way occasionally on dates in my first few years in New York I’d find myself in a guy’s apartment and even though he’d be nothing but skinny or bashful or shy or kind, my hackles would every so often rise a little, just with the awareness that I was with a stranger, a strange man, an unknown element—things could turn on a dime, don’t you know.
“He’s also got Mars in the seventh, which is common for hatred toward females,” Rainn says. He’s on a roll now. His voice is picking up speed and insistence; he’s clearly in his element. And what an unusual element it is. The science is so unprovable, the arguments so circular, as to seem meaningless. I’m wishing Marisa would help me out at this point. I feel rather alone on this raft of astrological serial-killer pseudoinformation and don’t really have the appropriate language to respond. I’m afraid of insulting him or sounding too challenging in my questions. She would know what to say, I’m certain. The suspension of disbelief, the way of just listening to someone talk without feeling the need to break it all down and make it a comment on who they are or what it means about you—she’d always been good at that.
Rainn is getting even more excited now, discussing impotence and homosexuality and latent anger, all the dark aspects of Mars in the seventh house. “Imagine all the rage you’d be carrying if you were a rapist who is impotent,” he says. Nope, sorry, can’t.
I look ahead and see Terry Richardson walk past the open doorway inside, on his way somewhere across the lobby, up, up, and away toward distant lands of eroticism and intrigue. Rainn is a good man, I have decided. A very peculiar one, but good. He is trying to connect in his own way, using the tools he has, using his words as we all do. Don’t we all speak different languages from one another, essentially? I feel myself becoming more and more California as I sink deeper into my lounge chair. Rainn’s blue is different from my blue and his love is different from my love and how he looks at the moon and stars is entirely different from anything I can conceive of. The best we can hope for is that our individual understandings of the world can mesh somehow, I’m thinking. It all makes so much sense in this exquisite golden light.
I have zoned out a bit now, but he’s still talking, and it’s okay. The words have become just absurd and repetitive enough to be almost soothing. I catch every other phrase or so: astronomically impossible, Bundy, deep emotion.
I watch the mint curl around the straw of Marisa’s mojito that has just arrived, the puckered leaves sticking out of the glass like a tiny fern. I breathe in the scent of the plants at the Chateau: the sickly sweet pink flowers that bloom and dry up and bloom again, the woodsy musk of the old skinny trees that have seen skinny movie stars dance beneath them. The moon is so low, it’s almost like it’s sitting right here with us.
12
TO BEAR WITNESS
“IF SHE WAS with us today, she would, I feel, be someone important,” Justin says with confidence in front of all of us from the stand. His testimony is heavy on feelings and intuitions and dramatic moments of reckoning, yet he displays far less emotion than Chris did and hardly seems nervous at all. He has his story down clearly and he sticks to it, his floppy hair falling over his face occasionally as he speaks. He pushes it aside with his right hand and continues talking. He doesn’t tire or tear up—his demeanor actually has more in common with the law enforcement officials who have spoken earlier than with any of Ashley’s other friends. Perhaps he’s done this before.
Ashley was “a very amazing person that would love to make friends with anyone,” he says. Justin’s grammar is not very amazing, and I’m having a hard time ignoring his odd word choices and verb misconjugations and mix-ups between that and who and which and whom. I feel guilty for being judgmental, but then a moment later I consider that a potential jury might think the same thing, and then I feel annoyed. This is the prelude to a goddamned capital murder trial for an alleged serial killer, goddammit—every detail counts. Pinstripes, billboard business, misplaced modifiers—you’re sending out signifiers whether you realize it or not. If there were
ever a time for precision, surely it is now.
Despite his diction, Justin’s account is eerie and compelling, and he paints himself as someone with a sixth sense for danger. It’s hard not to wonder how much of this is 20/20 hindsight or the massaging of details through years of repetition, but nonetheless enough facts and anecdotes are in place that I’m experiencing a bit of a horror movie heightened anxiety state while listening to him.
Ashley and Justin had just moved to the Pinehurst bungalow when Gargiulo entered the picture, Justin explains.
“Would it be a fair statement to say that Ashley became involved with a number of men while you lived with her?”
“Objection!”
“Sustained.”
There’s that old nugget again. Same question, different words, different person on the stand. Or are they the same words? Is it still the same person up there? I can’t recall, and it hardly matters at this point, anyway; it’s all blurring together. I have become inured to the fact that nearly every witness who knew Ashley will be asked, early on, some version of a casual query in disguise by the defense, forcing the witness to catalogue Ashley’s sex life, drug use, and promiscuity. Most questions will prompt sustained objections, though some won’t. And then we’ll get on with things. If only they could get it out of the way in the beginning: “State your name. Relationship to the victim. How would you rate her on the sluttiness scale? Six? OK, good. Moving on.”
Justin never really felt settled into the house, he continues, and moved out after a few months because he “didn’t have a good feeling about [the place].” Later, Chris would pull in his friend Jen to take over the lease as Ashley’s new roommate, but before all that happened, a bunch of peculiar—to me it sounded downright terrifying—stuff went down.
First was the time Justin was tasked with driving Gargiulo home from an art gallery opening they were at a short while after they met him. All of them were a little weirded out by the guy, but somehow Justin had gotten stuck taking him out one night. Gargiulo was over at the house, looking into their broken heater, and asked if he could tag along to the opening, so Justin felt sort of obligated, seeing as he was helping them. On the way back, there came a moment in the car when Gargiulo put his hand on top of Justin’s on the stick shift. “He grabbed my hand,” Justin acts out, using the open palm of his left hand to cover the fist of his right. It makes a dull clapping sound.
The gesture freaked Justin out, to the point that he immediately wanted Gargiulo out of the car. Justin is gay. Was Gargiulo hitting on him? Miller asks. Justin says no. He says all this quite steadily, as if he’s reading from a book but with a dash of “Can you believe it?” thrown in. There are none of the pauses or shaky voice of the rest of the friends who have testified. Not that I’m enjoying seeing people stutter and shake up there, but Justin’s affect does feel like a bit of a disconnect, especially considering that the narrative he’s telling is one of the most dramatic ones we’ve heard so far.
He continues: Later that same night, Justin was walking home from a friend’s house and saw Gargiulo’s green truck parked across the street from his and Ashley’s house. It was 3 a.m. He knew it was the truck because of the dangly wicker cross Gargiulo had hanging from the rearview mirror. Justin had seen it before. The whole thing raised a red flag. He immediately went inside and got on the phone to call Ashley, who was out. “This isn’t, you know, normal,” he said he remembered thinking. He tried to call her over and over again, but couldn’t reach her.
The next morning, almost as soon as Justin opened his eyes, the phone rang. It was Gargiulo; he wanted to come in right away and see what parts he needed to get to fix the heater.
Chris would tell me later that the timing of things was a little too convenient: Ashley’s house was always cold, so they liked to keep the heat on, and then suddenly her heater broke, right after Chris and Ashley had met Gargiulo. Right after he had given them his card, right after he had helped with Chris’s flat tire, and right after he’d said he was a heating and air-conditioning man. How funny that the next day, when the furnace conked out, they had just met someone they could call?
Gargiulo came in that morning, and Justin asked what he had been doing outside in the middle of the night. He started stuttering, Justin says. He seemed to be caught off guard. “I can’t go home,” he said. The FBI was there trying to get his DNA because his best friend’s girlfriend had been murdered.
“If you’re innocent, you have nothing to hide,” Justin says he told him.
With that, Gargiulo put his foot up on the couch, as Justin tells it, and then he raised his pant leg to reveal a knife in a case strapped to his calf. Gargiulo pulled out the knife to show Justin. What happened next? That line of questioning progresses into a discussion of how big the knife was, and then Justin says he rushed Gargiulo out of the house. “I told him I didn’t want to have anything to do with this business.”
After that, Miller pivots the questioning to parties, and we never really learn what happened next, at least what happened next that moment. Ostensibly their heater got fixed, parties were planned, and a few months later Ashley was dead. There was no shouting or fisticuffs or any of the disturbed reactions that to me would feel appropriate just then, though Justin did finally get a hold of Ashley to tell her what happened. The morning unfolded: showers were taken, coffee was brewed. Is it me, or is everyone in California just way more chill with weirdness, danger, and risk? Is it the drug use? The sunshine? Is it something in the water?
Justin admits that he thought Gargiulo was a creep and that he told Ashley that, but not in any particularly alarming way. There was no “Ashley, you’re in danger, girl.” Or even “Get away from this guy, he’s trouble.” More just like, “Eh, that guy. Do you have to invite him to our next party?” Ugh. Okay. Fine.
Justin did copy down Gargiulo’s license plate number that morning and sent it to his mother’s private detective. But then a few weeks later when Gargiulo stopped by again unannounced and Ashley was out of town, Justin still let him in to join a small preholiday gathering he was having. “Why?” asked Miller.
“I let him in because I wanted him to feel that what he said to me . . . I wanted to show that I really didn’t care about it, so there wouldn’t be any problem thereafter.”
But that knife! That knife! I wanted to shout. Who carries a concealed weapon like that? Who carries a concealed weapon and tells stories about being pursued by the FBI in connection to a murder and then still gets invited to parties? I was flummoxed, truly. Was the knife somehow passed off as related to his HVAC work? Was he so good-looking that none of this mattered? Did he just seem crazy but harmlessly so, not to be taken too seriously? Is it too easy to assume now that if anyone I had just met revealed a concealed knife to me in my home I would be terrified and immediately call the police? Or maybe that’s just because I look at knives differently now.
• • •
“Did you ever tell the defendant that Ashley was a stripper?” Deputy District Attorney Miller asks.
“No,” Justin answers swiftly. It’s clear that everyone wishes that this stripping stuff would just go away—it’s not relevant to the Ashley they knew, it’s not relevant to her death—but of course it won’t. More questions roll out, more calls for speculation about what really happened to Ashley in Vegas and why she kept going.
“Was it your belief that she needed the lifestyle if she didn’t need the money?” Lindner asks later.
“She was a party girl,” Justin replies, as if that explained it all.
There was that phrase again: party girl. Jen was asked about it, and now Justin answers with it. What does it really mean? There seem to be a few different definitions. In a generous reading, it could be synonymous with fun-loving, but in this hearing it is being used as a catchall euphemism. There is also a crucial distinction between being “the life of the party” and a party girl, and, depending on the context, that distinction seems to contain some gendered judgment. A young woman w
ho enjoys a good party is fine—perhaps she liked to drink a little too much, but for the most part she’s fun to have around and doesn’t offend anyone. A party girl, on the other hand, seems to suggest promiscuity and perhaps something a little predatory and desperate. A party girl may be unsafe. A party girl may be “asking for it.” A party girl isn’t connected to any one man. A party girl isn’t your mother or your sister, and she’s definitely not your wife. A party girl is escapist, a party girl burns bridges, a party girl isn’t too concerned with exactly whom she parties with, as long as the party stays fun.
• • •
Where did Ashley’s brand of party girl fit into all that? Years later, I would find myself in Las Vegas for the first time, visiting the club where Ashley had worked in hopes of figuring out more.
The DA after Marna Miller gave me the name—Cheetah’s—and suggested that beautiful LA women flying to Sin City on Friday evenings for weekends of light sex work—stripping, escorting, whatever—wasn’t as unusual as it sounded. “Go to Burbank airport on a Friday night, and they’re everywhere,” he said. It didn’t have to have deep psychological implications, he said, and for many girls the money was just too good to pass up.
I wanted to see for myself.
I took the night off from a media conference I was attending in downtown Vegas and headed over in a cab after dinner, a few new friends from the program in tow. After I’d mentioned my agenda for the evening earlier that day to my assigned roommate—“I’m planning on visiting the strip club where my murdered friend worked more than a decade ago”—by the afternoon, word had spread through the group, and suddenly I had scores of volunteers offering to accompany me. I was grateful for the moral support and even a little bit touched, even though I imagined that for them the whole thing was probably just a voyeuristic lark, fodder for the stories they could tell back home.
I had been to only one strip club before—a very soft-core place in the New York Financial District that also hosted rock shows—and I didn’t consider myself someone who would visit one unironically unless I had a very good reason. This was clearly a good reason, though I still wanted to get in and out as soon as possible. My goal was to just get a look at the place, to see if I could picture Ashley there, to soak in how it felt to be inside.
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