Serial Killer Andrew Urdiales

   

Andrew Urdiales was described as a loner, and as someone who had difficulty engaging in small talk. He graduated from Thornbridge High School in Doloton, Ill., in 1982, and was given the graduating senior label of "social outcast." He had few friends, and joined the U.S. Marine Corps a short time after completing high school, and was stationed at Camp Pendleton and other locales in southern California over the next eight years.

Urdiales also claimed to have fallen in love with a 15-year-old girl whom he had gotten pregnant. He said that marriage had been out of the question because he had been fearful of the girl's parents and what the Marine Corps might have done to him, in a judicial or disciplinary sense because of the girl's age. As a result, they had both agreed that the girl would get an abortion.

"I loved her and still love her," Urdiales later told a psychiatry professor at Yale University. "But the law and the state of California and the righteous and the Marine Corps might not see it that way."

Background information and testimony at trial later on showed significant evidence of mental illness on both sides of Urdiales' family, that he had been sexually abused by relatives, and that he had been physically and emotionally abused by his parents, according to court records.

During his military service, Urdiales received several promotions but was later demoted when those under his leadership refused to obey his orders. Killing four women during his Southern California military service, he received an honorable discharge in 1991 and returned to Chicago to live with his parents. Urdiales returned to California in September 1992 for a short visit in which he attacked Jennifer Asbenson, but returned to Chicago again. In March 1995, while vacationing in Palm Springs, he took the life of Denise Maney, his fifth known California murder victim.