Trial begins for man accused of serial rapes, dumping women’s bodies at L.A. hospitals

Online and in person, David Pearce presented himself to women as a talent manager, music mogul and other versions of a high-level Hollywood player — someone who could help make their L.A. dreams a reality, prosecutors said.

But that was all a front to lure them back to his Olympic Boulevard apartment, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Catherine Mariano, where Pearce became a “nightmare.”

“He’s the guy you fear your daughter encountering while out celebrating a birthday. He’s the guy you fear at a bar. … He’s the guy you fear your friend connecting with on a dating app,” Mariano said in court Thursday morning.

Prosecutors say that Pearce had been drugging and raping women for nearly two decades across Los Angeles, and that his actions turned deadly in November 2021 after Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola went home with Pearce and some friends following an East L.A. rave. The next day, the women were dumped at hospitals in a vehicle driven by Pearce and his roommate, Brandt Osborn, authorities said. Within two weeks, both women were dead of drug overdoses.

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Their deaths led law enforcement to investigate a host of sexual assault allegations against Pearce, 42, whose trial on two counts of murder and seven counts of rape began Thursday morning in downtown Los Angeles. Osborn, 45, is charged with two counts of being an accessory after the fact to Giles’ and Cabrales’ deaths, because he allegedly helped Pearce destroy evidence.

Prosecutors contend Pearce caused the women’s deaths by providing them with fentanyl-laced narcotics, then failed to get them medical attention when needed. A toxicology screen also found gamma-hydroxybutyrate — the date rape drug commonly referred to as GHB — in Giles’ system.

Seven other women accused Pearce of raping them between 2007 and 2020, and nearly all of them came forward after Giles’ and Cabrales’ deaths made headlines. Many of the women say they blacked out after Pearce served them a drink and woke up to him sexually assaulting them. At least two said Pearce became belligerent toward them and raped them after what started as consensual romantic encounters, but did not allege they ingested GHB.

Mariano said Pearce assaulted one woman on his couch, then forced her to apologize to his roommate, Osborn, because she made too much noise. He also threatened to hurt the woman’s family, the prosecutor said.

Pearce and Osborn have denied all wrongdoing. Jeff Voll, Pearce’s defense attorney, argued during his opening statement that the women and another man all used other drugs during the rave, and that there was no way to conclusively prove Pearce provided the fatal doses.

Giles’ and Cabrales’ deaths drew immediate suspicion from law enforcement after the women were dropped off at hospitals on Nov. 13, 2021.

A Toyota Prius without license plates left Giles, a 24-year-old model, lying unconscious at the entrance to Southern California Hospital in Culver City. She died a short time later. Cabrales was found at Kaiser Permanente in West Los Angeles, where she lay in a coma for 11 days before dying of organ failure and cocaine intoxication.

Pearce, Osborn and a third man, Michael Ansbach, were arrested a month later in connection with their deaths. Ansbach was never charged with a crime, however, and will now serve as a witness for the prosecution, Mariano said Thursday. He is expected to provide key insights into what happened in the apartment that night, including why Pearce waited so long to seek medical help, the prosecutor said.

Ansbach allegedly heard Pearce tell Osborn, “Dead girls don’t talk,” on the night of the overdoses, according to Mariano. A search of Pearce’s phone showed he began researching “non-extradition countries” after the women got sick, and police found $30,000 and a passport in his car when he was arrested, Mariano said.

“That is not something an innocent person would do,” she said.

An hour after arriving at the Olympic Boulevard apartment, the women texted each other that they wanted to leave and called an Uber, according to a search warrant affidavit. Security video showed a vehicle arriving, but the women never got in it.

According to the affidavit, Pearce and Osborn said they drove the unconscious women to hospitals about 12 hours later, claiming to be good Samaritans who found them passed out on a curb.

Pearce, however, had been seen giving what looked like cocaine to Giles and Cabrales at the rave, court records show. Mariano said Pearce knew that Giles had no pulse in the apartment and that Cabrales was in dire condition.

“At the end of the day, I didn’t do anything wrong, and obviously I’m not going to say anything that’s going to incriminate me,” Pearce told detectives during an interview after the women’s deaths, according to court records.

He went on to say that he had “watched, you know, people partaking in things that I had nothing to do with and I just tried to make the situation, you know, right.”

“It’s not like there was any, you know, foul play or anything I did,” he said.

The arrests led investigators to reexamine a string of previous sexual assault allegations against Pearce, a former club promoter described in court papers as a “freelance entertainment planner.” He was accused of rape in 2014, but prosecutors declined to file charges. Representatives for the district attorney’s office did not respond to inquiries about that case this week.

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Five other women, whose allegations did not result in criminal charges, are also expected to testify to show Pearce made a pattern of drugging and assaulting victims. The trial is expected to last at least two weeks, Mariano said.

Osborn — a native of Staten Island, N.Y., who has played bit parts in a few movies and TV series, most notably “Nurse Jackie” — is charged as an accessory after the fact for his role in driving the women to the hospitals. His attorney, Michael Artan, argued Thursday that Osborn drove the rest of the group to and from the rave, but went to sleep before they began partying at the apartment. Because he had no idea Pearce, or anyone else, had given the women drugs, he could not have known they were in mortal danger, Artan said.

Voll, Pearce’s attorney, said the women had used ketamine and cocaine at the rave before meeting his client. He also pointed to the discovery of a hollowed-out locket that he referred to as a “sno go” — a subtle piece of jewelry that can be used to hold a small amount of drugs in powder form — and suggested the fentanyl that killed the women could have come from narcotics held inside. He did not say to whom the locket belonged.

Cabrales studied architecture in Mexico and was working as a project manager before her death, according to an employment profile. She graduated from the University of Monterrey in Nuevo León, Mexico, at the top of her class in 2019 and was focused on interior design. She befriended Giles when she moved to Los Angeles.

Giles, born in Alabama, moved to Los Angeles to pursue modeling. She met her husband, Jan Cilliers, several years ago and the two quickly got married during a ceremony at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, according to Joshua Ritter, a victims’ rights attorney for Giles’ family.

“She was a delightful person, still young and figuring things out. Giving modeling a try but that might not have been her ultimate goal out of life. She certainly wasn’t involved in some sort of Hollywood underbelly where she was living some high-risk lifestyle,” Ritter said. “She was just out for a night of fun and met this complete predator.”

Times staff writer Matthew Ormseth contributed to this report.