O.C. Trial for Serial Killer?

She was a college student, a campus disc jockey whose gregarious personality sparkled on the airwaves.

He was a Camp Pendleton radio operator who confessed to police that he saw the young woman walking alone across a campus parking lot on a foggy January night in 1986. He stabbed her 41 times and considered her death the birth of his career as a serial killer.

In the years after 23-year-old Robbin Brandley’s murder at Saddleback College, her parents mourned privately, then channeled their grief into action, successfully pushing state legislators to require lighting at all public college campuses in the hope of preventing slayings like their daughter’s.

Until a few months before he was arrested in 1997, Andrew Urdiales said he continued to kill. Police believe that after Brandley’s death, seven other women died at his hands as he hopscotched between Southern California and his childhood home in Chicago.

Urdiales, now 40, is set to be sentenced to death in August for fatally shooting an Illinois woman in 1996 and dumping her body into the whitewater Vermilion River. Orange County prosecutors then will seek to extradite him to stand trial concurrently for Brandley’s slaying as well as the killings of four women from Riverside and San Diego counties.

“If there’s any murder that calls out for prosecution, this is it,” said Brandley’s father, Jack Reilley, 65. “It was cold-blooded and maniacal, a tragic violation of public safety.”

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Howard Gundy said Urdiales’ Southern California trial will probably start within three years, and Urdiales could be extradited as soon as this fall. The last accused serial killer tried in Orange County was Charles Ng, whose 1999 trial was moved to Santa Ana because of pretrial publicity in Northern California, where he killed 11 people in a remote cabin. Ng was sentenced to death.

Before his most recent trial in Illinois, which ended in May, Urdiales was already on the state’s death row for killing two other Chicago-area women. But the Illinois governor commuted his sentence -- along with the sentences of dozens of other inmates in 2003 -- to life in prison, citing flaws in the state’s capital punishment system.

Cook County prosecutor Jim McKay, who handled the case, said in a recent interview that the governor’s decision left him incensed. “It flew in the face of the evidence,” McKay said. “Urdiales is a dangerous, manipulative serial killer.”

Police connected Urdiales to the three slayings in Illinois when they ran ballistics tests on a gun taken from him during a 1996 traffic stop in Indiana. Urdiales confessed to the killings, then told authorities to call police in California, and said that he killed five women in that state and tried to strangle another. He talked to police for several hours in a taped confession that the prosecutor said was horrifyingly detailed.

“In some instances he was very proud, as if he was justified in what he did,” McKay said. “At other times he was cool, calm and matter-of-fact, talking about killing these women as if he were talking about the weather.”

He killed the others after minor arguments, McKay said, but Brandley was different. “She was an opportunity for him. He saw her when she was alone in a parking lot attempting to get in her car. She became a target.”

After killing Brandley, Urdiales changed his method of operation, investigators say, and began targeting victims with risky lifestyles such as prostitutes -- people who might not be as immediately missed as a college student. He told police he would drive the victims to remote places, where he would tie them up and have sex with them before stabbing or shooting them.

Capt. Bob Blackburn, an Orange County sheriff’s investigator, said he and his colleagues talked to Urdiales for three hours in the spring of 1997 to learn what they could about Brandley’s slaying more than a decade before. Little physical evidence was recovered after the slaying, so investigators focused on gathering details from him that they could -- and did -- corroborate, Blackburn said.

“We ... know you can’t convict anyone on a mere confession,” he said.

One of the state-appointed lawyers who represented Urdiales in the most recent Illinois trial said his client’s confession underscores his mental illness and his remorse. In both Illinois trials, Urdiales pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

“If he’s such a cold, calculated, cunning guy, why ... would he give them five additional murders?” said Stephen L. Richards, director of the Death Penalty Trial Assistance Division in the state’s appellate defender office. “He is genuinely ill.”

Mental Illness Blamed

Richards said Urdiales has Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder whose symptoms include tics, which caused him ridicule as a child. The lawyer said Urdiales also suffered sexual abuse by a family member and that he shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Brain scans, Richards added, show severe deficiencies.

“No one can say this is a case of malingering,” Richards said. “His mental illness handicaps everything he does.”

Because Urdiales has admitted to killing so many women -- he has never attempted to recant or contest his confession in court -- people are less sympathetic to his mental illness defense, Richards said.

Urdiales was a decorated Marine, stationed for two years at Camp Pendleton, then at Quantico before spending two years at Twentynine Palms. He returned home in 1989 to live with his parents in south Chicago, where he was a security guard.

While combining cases from several counties in one trial is uncommon, Orange County prosecutors said it is useful in Urdiales’ case to save time and money. Witnesses and a defense team need to be hired only once, and only one prosecutor has to learn the case, said prosecutor Gundy.

In death-penalty cases, jurors typically learn about the defendants’ other crimes during the sentencing phase.

“We’re not trying to join up the cases to make the Orange County case stronger,” Gundy said. “The jury will likely hear about them anyway.”

And for victims’ families, it drastically shortens the years it would take for separate trials to make their way through the three counties.

“It makes perfect sense to us,” said Brandley’s mother, Genelle Reilley, 65. “We don’t want this to drag on any longer.”

In recalling his crimes to his psychiatrist before his first trial, in 2002, Urdiales said the women begged for their lives, saying “ ‘Please don’t kill me’ and the usual babbling.” Watching women suffer excited him, he said, adding, “There is nothing to regret.”

Brandley’s father traveled from his Laguna Beach home to attend part of the earlier Illinois trial. When he saw Urdiales in person, he said, hatred was immediate and consuming.

“You just despise him,” Jack Reilley said. “He’s an evil person.”

For 11 years after their daughter’s death, the Reilleys had no target for their anger. And with little evidence, it was hard to keep hoping. But instead of letting their grief overtake them, they became active in victims-advocate groups, backing legislation geared toward helping victims and their families as their cases wended through the justice system.

And with the lighting legislation they lobbied for, they hope other college students will be safer on campus.

“We had the opportunity to make things better for other people,” said Genelle Reilley. “We knew we’d be listened to.”

A Haunting Discovery

For months after the killing of Robbin Brandley, darkness haunted the woman who found her body. A professor only a year older than her talented student, Julia Jenner would refuse to go inside her house before her husband came home. The brutality of what she had seen dominated her dreams.

It was a fluke that Brandley was on campus that night, said Jenner, who still teaches communications at Saddleback. Unable to get housing for her transfer to a San Diego university, she was continuing to take classes at Saddleback and had volunteered to take a sick usher’s shift that evening at a jazz concert on campus.

Jenner said the pair chatted about their childhoods for more than an hour at the punch and cake reception after the concert. Brandley left, and Jenner stayed to clean up. At about 11 p.m. -- about 15 minutes later -- another student drove Jenner to her car, and she saw Brandley’s body crumpled on the ground nearby.

Eighteen years later, Jenner said she can’t understand what drove someone to kill a young woman so brutally. She said she is proud that Brandley’s death spurred others to action, especially the victim’s parents.

“When something like this happens, you can shut down and let the grief overtake you and no one will blame you,” Jenner said. “But her parents became activists, making changes that so many people benefit from. Of course you wish it had never happened, but I’m sure Robbin’s murder has saved a lot of lives.”