‘Boy Next Door Killer’ could get death for 2 murders

LOS ANGELES — A judge denied a new trial for a man prosecutors called “The Boy Next Door Killer,” who could be sentenced to death later Friday for the home-invasion murders of two women and the attempted murder of a third.

Attorneys for 45-year-old Michael Thomas Gargiulo asked Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry P. Fidler for the new trial, citing the minimal physical evidence against Gargiulo in the home-invasion stabbing deaths of Ashley Ellerin in 2001 and Maria Bruno in 2005.

Fidler responded that while the evidence in each individual case was thin, taken together, along with the 2008 attempted murder of Michelle Murphy and a 1993 killing in Illinois, where Gargiulo faces a future trial, the evidence is powerful.