Ashton Kutcher’s link to the Hollywood Ripper case is that he had a first date scheduled with 22-year-old Ashley Ellerin on the night of February 21, 2001, the night she was stabbed to death in her Hollywood Hills home by Michael Gargiulo. Kutcher arrived at her door around 10:45 p.m., saw what he thought were wine stains through a window, and left assuming she had gone out without him. Eighteen years later, he testified for the prosecution at Gargiulo’s murder trial.
The Date That Never Happened
Kutcher and Ellerin were casual acquaintances, not a couple. They had met a couple of months earlier at a mutual friend’s birthday party and made plans to go out for the first time on the evening of the Grammy Awards.
That night, Kutcher was watching the Grammys at a friend’s house. He called Ellerin at 8:24 p.m. to say he was running late. She told him she had just gotten out of the shower. He didn’t reach her Pinehurst Road bungalow until roughly 10:45 p.m.
The gate was open. The lights were on. No one answered his knock. He yelled through a window, then looked through another and noticed a dark substance on the floor inside. He assumed it was wine left over from a housewarming party she had hosted the previous week. The front door was locked. He left, figuring she was upset about his lateness and had gone out.
Ellerin was already dead in the hallway outside her bathroom. She had been stabbed 47 times; 12 of those wounds were independently fatal. Her roommate found her body the next morning.
Why Kutcher Was Never a Suspect
Kutcher went to the police the day after the murder. He brought his cell phone to document his call log and pointed out that his fingerprints would be on the front door because he had tried to open it. He later testified that he was “freaking out” and wanted to make sure he wasn’t a suspect. Detectives cleared him quickly.
Investigators also cleared Mark Durbin, Ellerin’s property manager, who had been having a sexual relationship with her. No physical evidence linked him to the scene.
An early lead came from Ellerin’s friends, who told police about a “creepy air conditioner guy” who had inserted himself into her life by offering to fix a flat tire and then kept showing up to do repair work on her apartment. Her roommate believed he was stalking her. The friends knew him only as “Mike.” It took months to identify him as Michael Gargiulo, who lived blocks away. Even with the name, the case went cold for years.
Who Ashley Ellerin Was
Ellerin was born on July 16, 1978, in California. Her family moved to New Jersey when she was a child, and she returned to California during her sophomore year of high school. Friends described her as confident and magnetic, someone who “wanted to see the good in people,” as one childhood friend put it.
She attended UCLA before transferring to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, where she was pursuing a career in fashion. She was also working part-time at a Los Angeles strip club at the time of her death.
The Hollywood Ripper
Michael Thomas Gargiulo, born in Chicago on February 15, 1976, grew up in Glenview, Illinois. In 1993, when he was 17, his neighbor Tricia Pacaccio was found stabbed to death on the doorstep of her family’s home. DNA under her fingernails would later match him, but Cook County prosecutors declined to file charges at the time.
By 2001, Gargiulo was living in California and had made himself a fixture around Ellerin’s home. In December 2005, 32-year-old Maria Bruno, a mother of four, was stabbed to death and mutilated in her El Monte apartment. Gargiulo lived in the same gated complex, with a direct line of sight to her unit. A blue cotton bootie containing a drop of her blood was found in the courtyard; a matching bootie was later recovered from the attic of his apartment.
What finally caught him was a survivor. On April 28, 2008, Michelle Murphy, 26, was asleep in her second-story Santa Monica apartment when an intruder in a dark hoodie climbed in through a window, straddled her, and stabbed her with a serrated knife. She fought back, grabbed the blade, and kicked him off the bed. He fled saying “I’m sorry.” During the struggle he had cut himself on his own knife, leaving blood on her bedspread.
The DNA matched a profile already in the system from the Pacaccio investigation. Gargiulo, who lived across from Murphy, was arrested within 24 hours of the hit. In September 2008, while jailed for the Murphy attack, he was formally indicted for the murders of Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno. The press dubbed him the “Hollywood Ripper.”
Kutcher’s Testimony at the 2019 Trial
Gargiulo’s California trial featured a witness list of nearly 250 people. Prosecutors Daniel Akemon and Garrett Dameron portrayed him as a methodical killer who targeted women living near him, studied their routines, and broke into their homes at night. There was no evidence of robbery or sexual assault in any case; prosecutors argued Gargiulo derived a sexual thrill from the violence itself.
Kutcher took the stand on May 29, 2019. He walked the jury through the timeline: the 8:24 p.m. call, Ellerin telling him she had just gotten out of the shower, his arrival around 10:45 p.m., the unanswered door, the dark stains he mistook for wine. He told the court he had not left voice messages that day because he “didn’t want to seem too eager.” His testimony ran about 40 minutes and was not seriously challenged on cross-examination.
The point of putting him on the stand was narrow. Prosecutors used his account to fix the timing of the evening and to establish that by the time he stood on Ellerin’s porch, she was already dead. Defense attorney Daniel Nardoni argued that the killings might have been the work of other men, pointing to a neighbor’s report of screams around 8:30 p.m. and to the absence of Gargiulo’s DNA inside Ellerin’s or Bruno’s homes. Prosecutors responded that every alternative suspect had been investigated and cleared.
Verdict and Sentence
On August 15, 2019, after four days of deliberation, the jury found Gargiulo guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Ashley Ellerin and Maria Bruno and of attempted murder in the attack on Michelle Murphy. A week later, on August 22, the same jury rejected a defense argument that he was legally insane at the time of the crimes.
On October 18, 2019, jurors recommended the death penalty. On July 16, 2021, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler formally imposed a death sentence, calling the attacks “completely vicious and frightening” and saying that “everywhere that Mr. Gargiulo went, death and destruction followed.” Michelle Murphy told the court that “spending the night alone creates a world of fear in me.”
California has maintained a moratorium on executions since 2019, when Governor Gavin Newsom ordered the closure of the execution chamber at San Quentin. Gargiulo remains under a death sentence with no execution date set.