The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (31 page)

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-appointed 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.”

 

O
N
M
AY
23, 2002, after a six-week trial, the jury rejected Andrew Urdiales' claim of insanity and found him guilty of first-
degree murder of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber. The verdict may have been influenced by the fact that despite being treated for depression for several years, Urdiales had never been medicated nor diagnosed with any mental illness or personality disorder.

“The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming, and the evidence of his sanity is even more so,” lead prosecutor Jim McKay told the jury in his closing arguments. “He is angry, he is evil, and he is depressed, but you know what, folks? Mad, bad and sad don't equal crazy.”

Although the jury sentenced Urdiales to death a week later—after hearing from a string of relatives of the victims, including Jack Reilley—then-Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2003, automatically commuting Urdiales' sentence to life in prison. The following year, Urdiales stood trial in Livingston County for murdering Cassandra Corum. Again, he was convicted and sentenced to death. Urdiales appealed both convictions to the Illinois Supreme Court and lost. On October 29, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his federal appeal of his first conviction. He currently sits on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center, although Illinois hasn't executed an inmate since March 17, 1999.

Although the Orange County district attorney's office issued an arrest warrant for Urdiales when he confessed a decade ago, there's no chance he'll be extradited any time soon to stand trial for the five murders he committed in California. Deputy DA Howard Gundy told the
Weekly
his office would love to prosecute Urdiales for murdering Robbin Brandley, Mary Ann Wells, Julie McGhee, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney, but it may be more trouble than it's worth since Urdiales' attorneys could use the extradition to delay the eventual imposition of his Illinois death sentence.

“The irony in this case is justice may better be served if we let the state of Illinois complete the process, because if we don't do that, we may cause delay and a diversion he will look forward to
having,” Gundy says. “He's living in a very small cell out there. He's in perfectly good hands.”

Gundy adds that he sympathizes with the Reilleys' anger at the lack of progress in the case. “I understand the frustration of the parents and other people, but part of that is you can never do anything for those poor folks unless you can bring their loved ones back. That's the quandary of a prosecutor.”

Valerie Prehm, the woman whom the Reilleys suspected of being involved in their daughter's murder for 11 years, now lives in Seattle. She says Brandley's murder ruined her life. “I was one of the last people to see Robbin alive,” she says. “We were really good friends on campus. She was an outgoing, beautiful person. Everyone loved her.”

In 1991, Prehm's twin, Melanie, was brutally murdered in a Dana Point motel room. Although the police determined she'd been killed by an ex-boyfriend, Prehm says that shortly before Genelle Reilley came to her home and demanded she take a polygraph test, someone sent her a death threat. The message, sent with no return address, was assembled with letters cut out of magazines and newspapers and contained just five words. The first two—“Robbin” and “Melanie”—were crossed out. Beneath those words were “Valerie” and “You're Next.”

Robbin Brandley's murder caused Prehm to experience severe depression and alcoholism. She is currently unemployed. “[Genelle] hired a private investigator and followed me for six years,” she says. “At a time when I should have been getting jobs, I wasn't because she was placing reasonable doubt.”

Echoing her videotaped polygraph statement in 1992—five years before Urdiales was arrested—Prehm still insists that, while the man doesn't match the description of Andrew Urdiales, a mysterious stranger did in fact approach her at the piano concert, asking about Brandley. “When Robbin and I were seating people, some guy tapped me on the shoulder,” she says. “He had dark curly hair and thick glasses and an olive-green hunting
jacket. It didn't match [Urdiales'] description, so I guess it's insignificant.”

She vigorously denies playing any role in Brandley's murder, even as a witness. “I didn't leave the party with her,” she says. “I wish I did.”

Although Jack Reilley testified in the penalty phase of Urdiales' first trial, both he and Genelle refused to do so the second time around. They have cut off all contact with the Orange County Sheriff's Department and the DA's office. They believe their telephones have been tapped, that someone has repeatedly broken into their home and that these events have something to do with their daughter's murder 21 years ago.

“Our home has been broken into,” Genelle says. “And guess what they're taking: hairbrushes, frequently worn clothing. Things with DNA are being stolen out of our house, and that freaks me out. [Jack] has a nice camera. Why didn't they take that?”

A decade after Urdiales confessed to murdering their daughter, the Reilleys still believe that while Urdiales may have been present at the crime scene, he didn't act alone. Because Brandley was the only victim who wasn't a prostitute and who wasn't shot with a gun, they're still haunted with doubts about his culpability.