San Diego Woman 1 of 8 That Man Says He Slew

Police here said Saturday that one of the eight women Chicago security guard Andrew Urdiales confessed to slaying was a prostitute killed in downtown San Diego nearly a decade ago.

San Diego Police Lt. Jim Collins said law enforcement officials believe that Urdiales shot and killed Mary Ann Wells, 31, Sept. 25, 1988.

Wells’ death took place at the same time as a string of dozens of murders of prostitutes, transients and hitchhikers--all women--in San Diego County in the mid-1980s.

Wells’ murder was not among the 43 deaths investigated by a special homicide task force assembled in 1988 because it did not fit the pattern of those deaths, in which victims typically were strangled and dumped in a remote, rural area. Wells was shot in the head and left in a downtown alley in an area of low-rent hotels and warehouses. Seventeen of the 43 cases investigated by the task force, which disbanded in 1993, remain unsolved.

Collins said homicide investigators will now review those unsolved slayings to see if any can be linked to Urdiales, even though he has confessed to only one killing in San Diego.

In all, Urdiales, a 32-year-old former Camp Pendleton Marine, has confessed to slaying eight women in Illinois and Southern California, including three in the Palm Springs area and a student at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo whose death had remained unsolved for 11 years, police said Friday. Earlier reports erroneously said four of the slayings occurred in the Palm Springs area.

As former friends of the shy one-time Marine radio operator expressed shock that a serial killer may have been living among them, Urdiales was ordered held without bond in the killings last summer of three suspected prostitutes.

His family appeared in the courtroom sobbing but made no comment about the confessed killer.

Urdiales, who was working as a security guard at a downtown Chicago Eddie Bauer store, allegedly picked up two of the women in his car from a street where prostitutes congregate in the Chicago suburb of Hammond, Ind.

There, he bound their hands and feet with duct tape and took them to isolated Wolf Lake, in a public park on the Illinois-Indiana border, where he stabbed them repeatedly and then shot them in the mouth, Chicago police said.

The body of the third Chicago-area victim, Cassandra Corum, 21, of Hammond, was found July 14 in the Vermillion River about 90 miles south of Chicago. Police in Livingston County, where Corum’s body was found, said they expect to file charges against Urdiales early next week.

In the working-class Chicago neighborhood of modest bungalows and duplexes where the Urdiales family has lived for more than a decade, and where Andrew Urdiales returned to live in 1995, neighbors remembered him as a “normal” teenager who changed abruptly when he came back from the Marines.

Friends who attended Chicago’s Bowen High School with Urdiales recalled drinking beer and laughing with him in their school days by the light of bonfires in a forested area under an elevated highway called the Chicago Skyway.

The friends said Urdiales was sociable in those days, dating neighborhood girls in the area of mostly Serbian, Croat and Mexican immigrants. The area was once home to workers in neighboring steel mills. Now it is barren in areas where the mills have shut down.

One of the old friends, Gerry Thompson, 31, said Urdiales dated his sister for at least several months before he became a Marine, often taking her roller-skating at the Hammond Rollerdome.

“After he came back [from the Marines] he was different,” said Gary Zabala, 34. “If you waved to him, he’d look like he was looking right through you. I think the Marines changed his life.”

Urdiales served in the Marine Corps from 1984 to 1991 and was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms from 1987 to 1989. He also was stationed at Camp Pendleton.

Late Friday, Palm Springs police found a gun and knife in a storage locker registered in Urdiales’ name in Twentynine Palms and are conducting ballistics tests to see whether the gun matches those used in any of the slayings.

In the past two years, Urdiales was a regular at the Casino restaurant across the street from his parents’ home. Owner Nick Pervan-Kennedy said Urdiales came in often on weekends, always alone, and sat by himself in a corner, quietly drinking one or two beers. “He has the most beautiful, pleasant personality,” Pervan-Kennedy said. “I must say I was shocked.”

But the Urdiales family was no stranger to tragedy even when Andrew was a child. Urdiales’ brother, Arthur Jr., was killed during the Tet offensive in Vietnam, according to a commemorative brochure devoted to the lives of 11 U.S. Army soldiers from Urdiales’ Chicago neighborhood who were slain in the war.

Shortly thereafter, according to the brochure printed by Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Urdiales’ cousin, Charles Urdiales, was also killed in Vietnam.

On Saturday, Urdiales was transferred to Cook County Jail after his bond hearing. He faces arraignment Monday on two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault.

San Diego police detectives said investigators may travel to Chicago this week to interview Urdiales about the Wells slaying and other cases.

“From what he said to the Chicago police, we believe strongly that he is linked to this [Wells] killing,” Collins said.

In Orange County, sheriff’s deputies said a task force created in March to review outstanding homicides plans to start combing through case files of hundreds of unsolved murders.

This weekend, the task force is reviewing its files on the slaying of Robbin Brandley, the Saddleback College student from Laguna Beach killed in 1986, for forensic evidence to bolster its case against Urdiales, Sheriff’s Lt. Fred Lisanti said.

Brandley’s parents, Genelle and Jack Reilley, had pushed for state legislation requiring more lighting on college campuses ever since their daughter was stabbed to death in a dimly lighted campus parking lot after a concert. Their proposal became law in 1990.

On Saturday, Genelle Reilley said the family was bolstered by an outpouring of support from friends and strangers alike, and was busy returning a press of calls from police and the media.

“It’s just overwhelming. I hope the evidence is there that [Urdiales] is the one, and that if he is the one that he is brought to justice, and that he never walks the streets again,” Reilley said. “May he never do this to anyone else.”

Times correspondent Diana Marcum contributed to this story.