Serial killer Andrew Urdiales dies of possible suicide on San Quentin’s death row

Eight-time serial killer Andrew Urdiales, who last month was sentenced to death for murdering women in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, was pronounced dead over the weekend in what prison officials said Monday may have been a suicide.

Urdiales, who arrived on San Quentin’s death row on Oct. 12, was found unresponsive late Friday night by correctional officers conducting a security check, according to a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation statement.

Urdiales, 54, was pronounced dead early Saturday morning, prison officials said. His exact cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy, but according to the CDCR statement it is being investigated as a suicide.

“Urdiales was a monster who did not deserve to breathe the same air we all enjoy,” District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said in a statement released on Monday about Urdiales’ death. “He remained a callous coward until the end as he robbed the victims’ families of the right to be present when the State put him to death.”

Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer, who represents the father of victim Robbin Brandley, said news of Urdiales’ death was “bittersweet.”

“If this man had taken his own life decades ago, he would have saved all this pain and suffering he caused the victims and their families,” Spitzer said.

On Oct. 5, Orange County Superior Court Judge Gregg L. Prickett sentenced Urdiales to death, citing his “repulsive crimes of violence that were committed to “satisfy his own lust and anger on this weaker than himself.” Prickett had made clear that Urdiales was receiving consecutive death penalty sentences for each of the five Southern California murders, since no victim was less deserving than the others and even if one sentence was overturned the rest would remain.

During the sentencing, Urdiales expressed his condolences to the families of his victims, telling them he would “like to express my sincere apologies for what happened.”

“If I was a juror in my case, I probably would have done the same thing,” Urdiales said.

Urdiales killed Brandley in 1986 in a Saddleback College parking lot in Mission Viejo, and over the subsequent seven years killed Julie McGhee, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney in Riverside County and Mary Ann Wells in San Diego. He was previously convicted of killing Laura Uylaki, Cassandra Corum and Lynn Huberand in Chicago.

During his trial, the only woman known to have escaped Urdiales, in a Riverside desert in 1992, described his attempts to choke her to death after kidnapping and sexually assaulting her.

After his 1997 arrest, Urdiales confessed to carrying out the Orange County killing while stationed as a U.S. Marine at Camp Pendleton, the four murders in Riverside and San Diego counties while stationed at Twentynine Palms and three slayings in Chicago while working as a security guard after leaving the military.

During his most recent trial, Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy referred to Urdiales as a “misogynistic, sadistic monster” who “genuinely deserves to die for what he has done.”

Urdiales’ attorneys did not dispute his role in the killings. But they told jurors that Urdiales had been born with brain damage due to his mother drinking while pregnant, and had suffered a childhood marked by emotional, physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 25 death row inmates have committed suicide since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978. The day after Urdiales’ death, condemned inmate Virendra Govin was also found dead of an apparent suicide, prison officials said.

Both Urdiales and Govin, who was sentenced to death in 2004 by a Los Angeles County jury for the killings of four people, were in single cells. Prison officials said there is no indication that the two death row inmates’ deaths are related.