The Honolulu STRANGLER - Hawaii's First Serial Killer Was Never Caught

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But for about a year in the mid-80s, the island of Oahu found out just how wrong that was. A woman were being taken one at a time, snatched right up, only to turn up dead by the water with their hands bound behind them. And nobody saw anything, so nobody could stop it. And the man doing it seemed to melt right back into the sunshine every single time, like he was never even there. Eventually, the bullies did find them, and they were dead certain they had their guy, and yet somehow, they just never had enough to nail them down. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town where today we've got a wild unsolved case for you. One where the killer put his victims on display for the whole world to see. And he fed off the fear, relished in it, and let it rip through the entire state of Hawaii. So, let's head out there now and dig into the case of the Honolulu Strangler. In 1986, life in Oahu was about as good as a god. Tourism was at an all time high, the beaches were bumping, and Honolulu had this reputation as one of the most beautiful and welcoming cities anywhere on the planet. And people didn't just go there on vacation, they fell in love with the place, and never went back to the mainland. They sold their house, packed up the kids, and started over eight time zones from wherever they came from. They had military families all over the island too, sailors and soldiers raising their kids just a few blocks off the beach. But for a stretch of time in the mid-80s, something very dark was moving through that island. And the folks living in paradise were about to find out what I keep telling you on this show. Every town's got a dark side, even the ones that look like heaven. And for this place, it all started on a Tuesday evening in January 1986. The Honolulu Police Department got a call from the parents of Regina Sakamoto, and they were barely keeping it together. Regina was just 17, and she left for school that morning, around 8, same as any other day, but that was the last anyone saw her. By the time they made that phone call, they already knew, and somewhere deep down in that place a parent never wants to look, but something was very wrong. The police took the missing persons report, but whatever they had lined up for the next morning got thrown out the window, is before they could even get going, another call came in early. This one was from a local fisherman who was out on the water, and he found the body of a young woman floating in Kihihi Lagoon. The second the cops got down to that shoreline, and they knew this was no accident. And Regina, she was naked from the waist down with her hands bound behind her back. They were ligature marks around her neck, and tied around one of her ankles was an electrical cord. The other end of it fastened to the rocks along the shore, anchoring her body right there to the land. Each man who ever did this, didn't just toss her in the water and drive off hoping she'd sink and disappear. They tied her down with the tide, was bound to put her on display, and they wanted to show off to the world what they had done. Emergency responders pulled her in, moved her off side away from public eyes. Regina's mother was then brought in to make the identification, and she knew the second she laid eyes on her that that was her little girl. The autopsy confirmed Regina had died from strangulation, and she'd been s8 before she was killed. When investigators started sitting down with the people who knew her, the last morning of her life slowly came into focus. As it turns out, she left the house right on time, but somewhere along the way she missed her bus. So, she stopped at a pay phone, called her boyfriend to let him know she'd be late getting to school. Her police confirmed that call actually happened, and it was the last time anybody ever heard her voice. She never made it to school, and because nobody followed up on her empty desk, hours went by before a single person in her life, her own family included even realized she was gone. And nobody who knew her could make any sense of it. Regina was shy and sweet, she didn't have enemies, and wasn't mixed up in anything. There was simply nobody in her world who seemed even remotely capable of doing this to her, which left detectives staring down one very uncomfortable possibility. And this was a stranger. Somebody who saw the girl and plucked her up out of her routine, so that they could do what they did. And this was a major problem, because not only was a 17 year old girl now dead, but she wasn't the first. Regina wasn't even the first one pull that a key he lagooned. Just seven months before, on a little police got a similar call, only this one wasn't from a fisherman. It was from a guy on his way to work who just so happened to take a detour that he'd never forget. He spotted a woman down at the water's edge and called it in. When police got there, the scene was rough. She'd been strangled with a ligature. Her hands were tied behind her back. Within a day they had a name. It was 25 year old Vicki Purdy. And there were some differences between the two cases, and Vicki hadn't been tethered to anything, and she wasn't all the way in the water either. It looked more like her body had been shoved down the embankment and left wherever it came to rest. None like Regina Vicki wasn't some teenager walking to a bus stop, but she was a married woman. Her husband Gary was an army pilot and by every catch he had a full settled life. But the way she vanished, that part felt awfully familiar. On the night of May 29, Vicki had gone out with some friends. Nothing crazy, she was actually supposed to be home early, but she never walked through the door. And Gary started paging her once, twice, then over and over all through the night. Every single time he got nothing back. By morning he'd filed a missing persons report and gone out looking for himself, and in fine Vicki, what he found was her car, sitting abandoned in the parking lot of the hotel where she and her friends had parked that night. There was a fresh den in it, nobody could explain. No sign of her inside, no record of her ever renting a room there, just her car, sitting right where she left it. And police managed to track down a cab driver, who remember dropping Vicki back at that exact lot around midnight. So she'd made it to her car, she'd been right there standing in the parking lot. And all while Gary was standing there staring at that dent, trying to make sense of it, police were clear across town taking a report about a woman's body down at the lagoon, and it was his wife. And they were still working Vicki's case by the time Regina turned up in that same lagoon seven months later. And then, on February 1st, police got called out yet again. A third woman had been found near Kiihi Lagoon, this time though, something a bit different. Your body was wrapped up in a tarp. When they pulled it back, her hands were bound behind her back. Tamis Vicki and Tamis Regina. At that point, there was just no getting around it anymore. It was almost certainly a serial killer operating in beautiful Honolulu. A task force got put together on February 5th, and that same day, they released the name of the third victim, Denise Hughes. Denise was 21 years old and married to a sailor named Charles, who was stationed over at Pearl Harbor, and she'd been missing since January 30th. The night before she vanished, she had dinner with Charles on his ship and headed home around 10. About an hour after she left, he gave the house a call just to make sure she got back all right, and she had to pick it up. She was home, everything was fine. Except the next morning, she didn't show up for work. Her boss called Charles, and that's the moment he knew something wasn't right. He was just like Vicki, just like Regina. Denise had been there one minute and gone the next. Police officially put out a public warning, telling women all over the island to be careful to watch their backs and not take rides from strangers, which, given what they were dealing with, felt like bare minimum. And that warning changed the whole feel of the island. I mean, this was Hawaii, sunshine, and palm trees. A postcard paradise, people saved up for years just to see once. But underneath all that, a different version of the place had started to take hold. The women stopped going out after dark on their own, and mothers waited up at the window for daughters who used to come and go as they please. The beaches were still packed in the daytime, but once that some went down, a quiet kind of fear settled over the whole island. They could feel it, and somewhere out there was a man who'd done this three times now, and nobody had the faintest idea who he was or where he'd turn up next. And still though, it wasn't enough, because just two months later on April 2nd, another body turned up. The fourth victim was 25-year-old Luis Mediros, but this time the killer changed things up because Luis wasn't found a key high lagoon. As she turned up, clear on the other side of things, their wakalee stream tucked underneath a freeway overpass, about 12 miles from where the other girls had been left. And when investigators looked up, they realized the drop from that overpass down to the ground was 95 feet. They believe that's exactly how she got there, thrown off the top like she was nothing at all. As she was partially nude, her hands tied behind her back, so same signature, same man. As to who that man was exactly, while police didn't know, but they were starting to understand something about him. And think back to Regina, tied off to those rocks so the tide couldn't carry her out. Maluise, thrown off an overpass in the open for anybody driving by to spot. He wasn't burying these women out in the woods where they'd never turn up. He was leaving them out there where the whole island would have to look at them. It's a guy killing to satisfy something in himself, sure, but he also wants the credit for it. He wanted Honolulu scared, and that fear wasn't some side effect of what he was doing. For him, the fear was the whole point, and you could feel it running through everybody on the island. Louise have been missing since March 26th. That night she boarded a late flight back to Oahu, after visiting family on Kauai. She was actually attending her mother's funeral, and while there, her and her sisters talked all about the killer and the women vanishing off the street and washing up dead. It's so much though that they begged her to stay, and just one more night where she'd be safe, and then she could fly home in the morning. They didn't want her standing around in the dark alone waiting for a ride, didn't want to lose another family member. While Louise had other kids at home waiting on her, and she needed to get back to them. So she hugged her family goodbye and got on that plane. She was also three months pregnant at the time. In the last time anyone saw Louise Mediros, she was standing at the airport bus stop waiting in the dark for a way home, exactly what her sisters had been afraid of. And then, almost like clockwork, just under a month after her body turned up under that bridge, another woman went missing. Her name was Linda Pesh and she was 36 years old. When Linda's Toyota turned up abandoned on the Nimitz highway on the night of April 30th, nobody needed a whole lot of convincing that something bad had happened to her. A roommate reported a missing that very same night and it took investigators about a day to connect that abandoned car to the missing woman. But once they did, they did something pretty clever. They had the car towed right back to the exact spot where it had been found. And then, they started flagging down drivers, hundreds of them. Anybody who used that stretcher road asking the same thing over and over, did you see this car or the woman driving it the night she disappeared? And what came back was real interesting. The one witness remembered seeing Linda's car pulled over on the side of the Nimitz for the tazard lights flashing, so her car had broken down. She was stranded out there on the side of the road in the dark, alone, and about as vulnerable as a person can be. And a few of those same witnesses remembered something else, a light-colored cargo van parked close by, and maybe with some lettering on the back window. Maybe not. Nobody was 100%. One of the investigators put out a sketch of that van and then waited. A few days later on May 2nd, they got a call from a man named Howard Gay. And he told them he found bones out on sand island, this mostly empty stretch of land sitting right near Key High Lagoon. And then, almost like it was an afterthought, he mentioned that a psychic had told him Linda's body was out there as well. So investigators sent a team, and Howard, he walked them straight to the bones. They turned out to be pig bones, so a bit of a letdown in terms of finding real evidence for this case, but hey, they were already out there, so they had to look around. A Howard even hung around to help them search. Nothing else turned up though, and eventually everybody packed it in and went home. But the very next day, somebody else called in from sand island. And that call let investigators write to Linda's body, buying somewhere between 75 and 150 feet from where they'd all been standing the day before, looking at a pile of pig bones. But she was naked, and her arms tied behind her back. And that's when it hit them. The day before, when Howard was right there helping them comb that island, he walked them in circles around that exact spot. He steered them clear of it, every time they got close. This man, he knew precisely where Linda was the entire time, and he wasn't there helping in the search, he was playing with them, making sure they didn't find her. Around this time, investigators were going back through Linda's office, and she worked in sales, and that previous January, she spent her days canvassing the area right around the airport. And sitting there on her desk was a notepad, and written on that notepad was a name and a phone number, Howard Gay. Turns out Linda had tried to sell him a pager, and Howard worked at a company right next to the airport called Flying Tiger Cargo, and that job came with access to a company vehicle, a white cargo van. One that up until pretty recently had the company's name printed across the rear window, so they put Howard under surveillance, and here's where it gets good. By the time investigators released that sketch of the van on May 5th, they'd already sat and watched Howard scrape the lettering off the back of his. On a medical examiner, it managed to recover semen samples from some of the victims, and right away, something jumped out. The sperm count in those samples was strangely low, and some of them just a handful of cells, and at least one, none at all. And that told investigators something specific about their guy. Whoever did this, either had a serious reproductive problem, or he'd had a vasectomy, and Howard Gay had had a vasectomy. The problem was this was the '80s, there was no DNA testing yet, none of the stuff we take for granted now. All they could do was test blood types, so that's what they did, and trouble is blood type can really only rule people out and nail them down. And Howard's blood type happened to be the most common one on the planet, so him matching it didn't mean a thing other than they couldn't cross him off the list. They arrested him anyway, but when investigators took everything they had over to the prosecutors and pushed hard for an indictment, those prosecutors looked it over and said no, it wasn't enough, not to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a jury. While they still had him in custody, they brought Howard in to the Criminal Investigation Division, they sat him down for questioning. He was in that room for 10 hours, and over that time, every instinct, the investigators had told them they were sitting across from their killer. It wouldn't look any of them in the eye, he kept his arms crossed the whole time, and every single question seemed to wind him up a little tighter. And at the very end of it, Major Luis Sousa leaned in and asked him flat out, "Did you murder Linda Pessie?" Howard dropped his head and said no, he didn't do it. He then agreed to take a polygraph, and he failed it. Investigators needed more, and they had to dig, and they needed to find something on them. They searched his house, the van, his entire workplace, and went through every inch of all three and they came up with nothing. Howard got himself an attorney who told him to stop talking, and just like that, it was over. Without enough to charge him, police had to let him go. And from there, the whole case started to come apart. Within a few months, the task force got cut down to half its size. Not long after that, they shut it down completely. Howard didn't get to just stroll off and pick his life back up like none of it had happened. Because the police, they never stopped watching on it. They tracked his movements around the clock. Everywhere he went, there was somebody keeping eyes on him. When he flew to the mainland, HPD went too. When he left the state for good, Honolulu Police got on the phone with whatever local department was wherever he landed and asked them to pick up the watch. They were not done with Howard Gay, not even close. Over the years, Howard made his way up to East Coast. He spent some time over in Europe, and by 2002, he settled down somewhere in the Midwest. And guess what, investigators followed him every step of the way. In every single city he passed through, there were no victims. Nothing that matched the pattern. So, did he know he was being watched, did he stop, or was Howard Gay never the killer in the first place? Well, here's something that could help explain all of it, and it's extremely interesting. In June of 1986, not long after that last murder on Oahu, Howard's own son pulled over on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist. And while he was out there trying to lend a hand, an oncoming car hit him and killed him. So, the man investigators were convinced had been hunting vulnerable women. Women whose cars had broken down in some cases, bossed his own son because that boy stopped to help somebody in the exact same situation. And you couldn't write it, this is the kind of thing that doesn't feel like it should be allowed to be true, and yet it is. And after he lost his son, well Howard reportedly found religion, he became a born-again Christian. And from what most folks say, that faith turned into a real big part of the rest of his life. Did it change him? Did something in him finally break or shift? Well, I guess that's one more thing we'll never get to know. Because Howard gay is gone now. He died in 2003 and he went to his grave, never having been charged with a single one of these murders and nobody else has either. And so that's where this case sits today officially unsolved. Five women, one suspect, everybody felt certain about and not one charge to show for it. Here's the thing though, DNA technology has come a long way since '86. Techniques that flat out did not exist back when these women were killed can now pull a usable profile off evidence that everybody once wrote off is too old and degraded. And with these genealogical DNA databases now, you don't even need a perfect sample anymore. A partial profile can be enough to point investigators toward a relative and from that relative straight to a suspect. Now, those semen samples taken from some of the victims were always one of the strongest pieces of evidence anybody had in this whole case. Now, although those samples still exist in a shape that today's technology could actually do something with, or whether anybody out there is even actively chasing that down right now, we don't really know, but it is possible and that's how this case gets solved. Our game might be gone, but he still has a surviving son that we know of. If a usable profile is still sitting in an evidence lock or somewhere, and that son isn't any database anywhere, then the science could go and do the one thing that justice system never managed to. And for Regina, Vicki, Denise, Louise, and for Linda, at one possibility, it's just about the only thing left that even resembles hope. So, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town, I appreciate you tuning in. Now, if these are the kinds of stories you're into, then you're in the right place. We've got a ton more with this came from, so subscribe and take a look around. Remember to watch your backs out there, and come on back next week for another new scary strange and mysterious story, because you never know, maybe your town will be next. [BLANK_AUDIO]