A Hollywood producer, David Brian Pearce, who drugged, raped, and murdered two young women, has been sentenced to 146 years to life in prison by a court in the United States.
Pearce was convicted of killing 24-year-old Christy Giles and her 26-year-old friend Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola in November 2021.
According to reports from ABC7 Los Angeles, investigators also discovered that Pearce had raped several women over more than 10 years.
He was found guilty of multiple crimes including forcible rape, sexual penetration by use of force, rape of an unconscious person, and sodomy by use of force.
Prosecutors said Pearce met Giles and Cabrales-Arzola at an after-hours party and later drugged them so he could sexually assault them.
The details of how the two women died are disturbing. On November 13, 2021, Giles, who was a model and wanted to become an actress, was already dead when she was taken to Southern California Hospital at Culver City in Los Angeles.
Cabrales-Arzola, who worked as an architect, was in critical condition when she arrived at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Hospital. Her family had to make the painful decision to remove her from life support later that month.
Prosecutors told the jury that Pearce and another man named Brandt Walter Osborn were the ones who dropped the women off at different hospitals two hours apart after they overdosed at the apartment the men shared.
According to medical reports, Giles died from a deadly mixture of cocaine, fentanyl, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, and ketamine.
Cabrales-Arzola died of multiple organ failure, with cocaine, ecstasy, and other unidentified drugs found in her body.
Pearce denied giving them the drugs that killed them, but after two and a half days of discussion, the jury decided he was guilty.
Osborn, 46, who was facing two counts of being an accessory after the fact, is waiting for a possible new trial after jurors said they could not agree on a verdict for him.
Giles’ mother, Dusty, said she was “so proud” of the prosecutors for winning the case. She also expressed happiness that Pearce’s sexual assault victims “finally had their day in court.”
Pearce had worked as a producer in the film industry and used his position to gain access to vulnerable women over many years before his crimes were discovered.
