Man is convicted of killing six

A former forklift operator was convicted Friday of murdering six prostitutes in a three-month rampage of strangulation rapes during which he taunted police and dared them to catch him.

The Los Angeles Superior Court jury that convicted Ivan J. Hill, 45, will now have to determine if he should receive the death penalty for the killings, which took place from November 1993 to January 1994.

The penalty phase of the trial will begin Nov. 29. Hill has confessed to killing the women but asked that he be spared execution.

The crimes occurred along the industrial corridor from the City of Industry to Ontario, near where Hill worked as a warehouseman. During the rampage, he telephoned police and said they needed to catch him before he killed again.

“I did it again,” Hill said in a Jan. 12, 1994, call to Pomona police in which he reported the location of one of his six victims. “What’s this, No. 5, No. 6? I forget, but she’s there.”

Hill was charged with six counts of murder, with special circumstances for multiple murder and having been convicted in 1979 for being an accomplice in another slaying.

His lawyer, Jennifer Friedman, tried to argue that Hill was on a downward spiral of drug addiction at the time of the murders, which she characterized as compulsive rather than carefully thought out.

Prosecutors said Hill used rags and ropes to tie up and strangle his victims -- clear evidence, they said, of premeditation and deliberation. Prosecutors also contended that Hill got more skilled with each murder, another sign that he thought out the killings.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Monaghan said Hill strangled his first victim, Betty Sue Harris, with his bare hands Nov. 1, 1993. Four days later, Roxane Brooks Bates was strangled with a cord or cloth.

The third victim, Helen Hill, had her hands tied behind her back and her mouth taped when she was strangled.

During the opening of the trial, the prosecutor showed a photograph of a patch of duct tape found in a trash bin near the body of Donna Goldsmith, his fourth victim. The tape was imprinted with a lipstick stain in the shape of a mouth, which Monaghan said was made by Goldsmith. She was strangled with rope, shoelaces and a sheet of black fabric, Monaghan said.

Cheryl Sayers was found dead in Ganesha Park in Pomona on Dec. 30, 1993, with her neck, wrists and ankles bound.

Debora Denise Brown was found Jan. 12, 1994, in San Antonio Park in Ontario with a piece of blue fabric tied around her neck, after Hill had called Pomona police.

Hill acknowledged making the phone calls, which Monaghan said were not immediately traceable because they went through the main Police Department line, rather than 911.

Friedman said that at the time of the killings Hill had lost 50 pounds and spent $3,000 on drugs in a few weeks. The killings stopped just before he was arrested in early 1994 for a series of armed robberies.

Hill was not linked to the murders until 10 years later, when DNA samples were taken after he had been convicted and sent to prison on the armed robbery charges.

michael.kennedy@latimes.com