The man on the phone sounded friendly enough, and more importantly, willing to help with Cook County Sheriff Det. Lou Sala's case.
It was 2002 and since 2000 Sala had been assigned to investigate the killing of Tricia Pacaccio, a 18-year-old girl repeatedly stabbed outside her Glenview home in 1993.
Strong leads were few in the cold case, and Sala was calling a list of names previous detectives already had spoken to when he found Michael Gargiulo, a former neighbor of Pacaccio who had moved to Los Angeles.
Their conversations were cordial and Gargiulo seemed cooperative, until Sala suggested Gargiulo submit his DNA for testing.
"That's when (Gargiulo) backtracked; that's when he got kind of funny," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Patterson.
The conversation was among the first steps in the chain of events that shored up a key connection in the case against Gargiulo -- a DNA match linking him to the evidence found under Pacaccio's fingernails.
To be sure, Cook County State's Atty. Anita Alvarez said Thursday that 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. A DNA match linking Gargiulo to the crime, she said, was critical to the case, but in the end it was no "silver bullet."
Still, the strange path that led to the match demonstrates that homicide investigation is often far from the open-and-shut cases solved in 60 minutes by fictional detectives on televised crime dramas.
In 2002, when Gargiulo balked at going to a Los Angeles police station to have his DNA taken, Sala told him he would come to Los Angeles himself to collect a sample.
"So Lou said: 'I'm going to come out to Los Angeles. You're not comfortable with L.A. cops, so I'll stick a Q-tip in your mouth and get the sample that way," Patterson said.
Gargiulo agreed.
But when Sala traveled to southern California, he didn't find Gargiulo in any of the places he said he would be. He contacted investigators at the Hollywood Division and was sitting with a detective talking over the case when a detective from a nearby cubicle overheard them and poked his head into the conversation.
Los Angeles Det. Tom Small had been investigating the stabbing death of Ashley Ellerin, a 22-year-old girlfriend of actor Ashton Kutcher whose body was found in her Hollywood bungalow in February 2001.
As he investigated the murder and eliminated suspects, one person he could not rule out was a man he knew as "the furnace guy," a heating repairman. Through interviews he learned the man's name was Michael Gargiulo and got a photo of him.
"We compared notes and found out what kind of case they had and what they were looking for," the detective said, "and the bells went off."
"That's the same guy we're looking for," Small said Thursday in a telephone interview.
Sala never found Gargiulo on that trip to Los Angeles, Patterson said.
On his end, Small continued to investigate the Ellerin murder, and Gargiulo "kept moving up the food chain" of suspects. Eventually Small obtained a court order and tracked down Gargiulo, allowing him to collect a DNA sample, which he promptly sent to Cook County detectives.
The sample allowed them to compare the DNA evidence found under Pacaccio's fingernails to Gargiulo's known profile. In 2003, the Cook County detectives got word that the profiles matched.
Gargiulo's DNA profile was entered into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a FBI database of DNA profiles from police departments around the country. Police said the database helped link Gargiulo to two other attacks.
Santa Monica Police Sgt. Richard Lewis was a robbery-homicide detective in 2008 when he was assigned to investigate an attempted murder case in a apartment building on April 28 of that year. During the investigation, DNA was collected at the scene and was sent to the Orange County Crime Lab, Lewis said in an interview.
About five weeks later, he got a call from the crime lab saying there was an unknown male profile in the DNA sample. It was entered into CODIS, and a few days later results came back with a positive match to Gargiulo, Lewis said.
With a name in hand, Lewis' investigation shifted to finding Gargiulo, whom records listed as living in Los Angeles. Lewis said he tracked down Gargiulo after he found a traffic accident report that listed his address in Santa Monica. Gargiulo was difficult to find through conventional records searches because his home was listed in his wife's name, according to Lewis.
The Santa Monica address led detectives to an apartment directly across an alley from the victim in the 2008 attack.
"He could look through his window directly into her apartment," Lewis said.
Gargiulo was arrested in June 2008 and charged with the Santa Monica attack. He was charged in the Ellerin murder in September of that year, as well as the 2005 murder of Maria Bruno in El Monte, another suburb of Los Angeles.
Lewis said he was speaking some months before with a friend who was a detective with the Los Angeles Sheriff's department, who described to him the stabbing death of Bruno in her apartment by an unknown attacker. As he investigated the Santa Monica attack, certain circumstances of his case matched those of the El Monte murder -- including the way the victim was attacked with a knife in her home and killed brutally.
The information was passed on to the sheriff's detective, who determined that Gargiulo lived in the same building as the victim at the time of the killing, Lewis said.
Gargiulo is currently being held without bail in Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail.
alwang@tribune.com
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