LA producer accused of killing model and architect says he's not a ‘monster' as court hears disturbing evidence

Independent

27-01-2025

A Hollywood producer accused in the 2021 overdose deaths of a model and an architect claimed the women were 'still breathing' when he dropped their bodies off at area hospitals, and insisted he is not a 'f**king monster' as disturbing evidence continues to play out in court.
Pearce, 43, who has pleaded not guilty to killing Christy Giles, 24, and her friend Hilda Cabrales-Arzola, 26, two women he partied with on November 13, 2021, appeared in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom on Friday for day 13 of his double murder trial.
A jury heard a recording of a police interview in which Pearce told detectives at the time that he was only trying to help.
'I didn't think they were dead,' Pearce told the LAPD detective. 'I thought they were breathing, that's why I brought them to the hospital. I'm not some f**king monster.'
Prosecutors say Pearce and his actor friend Brandt Osborn, partied with the women and gave them a fatal cocktail of drugs – which included cocaine, fentanyl, ketamine, heroin, MDMA, and the date rape drug GBH – before dumping their bodies outside two separate LA hospitals.
Giles was pronounced dead at the scene. Cabrales-Arzola was put on life support and suffered from multiple organ failure. She was taken off life support the day before her 27th birthday.
The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner determined their deaths to be drug-induced homicides.
In the police interview played for the court, Pearce denied giving drugs to the two women he had met hours earlier at a party before bringing them back to his apartment.
The two women had visited an art exhibit at Soho House in West Hollywood before going to a warehouse party in East Los Angeles where they met Pearce and his friends.
Pearce claimed that he didn't even have any drugs at his apartment and that he wasn't into 'buying drugs and doing drugs,' adding 'I come from a good family. My parents raised me well.'
'I feel horrible that two girls died,' he went on to say in the interview. 'They were active drug users and I didn't give them any drugs. I knew they were at a rave. I was told that there was a very bad batch of fentanyl going around in the USC area. I don't do that stuff. It's scary. It's f**king scary.'
Detective Jonathan Vander Lee told the court on Friday that at the time of the recorded interview, it had not been disclosed that fentanyl was a factor in the women's deaths. He added that police were not even aware that fentanyl was a factor in their deaths until the following April.
Lee testified that when Pearce's Prius was searched, detectives found his passport and a bag with $30,250 in cash. He said they also found 'trophies' belonging to Pearce from 'Granite Cock Films,' a porn company, and a face mask similar to one prosecutors say was worn by Pearce when he dumped the bodies, Daily Mail reported.
The detective's testimony comes after the court saw security camera footage of Pearce carrying the women's bodies out of his apartment on the night of November 14, 2021.
Pearce first dumped Giles at Southern California Hospital in Culver City and when he returned to his apartment, he saw that Cabrales-Arzola was 'progressively getting worse' but that 'she was breathing and making noise so she wasn't dead.'
He then drove her limp body to Kaiser Permanente hospital in West LA and told the detective, 'Hilda was alive at the hospital.' The detective informed him she was in fact dead, but that doctors revived her and she remained in ICU until she died weeks later.
Pearce was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and then charged in July 2022 with two counts of murder and two counts in the sale, transport and furnishing of a controlled substance.
Brandt Osborn, who was also captured on surveillance camera footage leaving the warehouse rave with both women, was also arrested in the case. He was charged with two counts of accessory after the fact.
Another friend, Michael Ansbach, 50, alleges Pearce gave him and the two women alcoholic drinks and cocaine laced with fentanyl, according to prosecutors. He was initially accused of being an accessory to manslaughter but was not charged in the case.
Prosecutor Catherine Ann Mariano said that while the women had consumed alcohol and drugs before going to Pearce's apartment, she alleged that the drugs Pearce gave them were what 'ultimately killed them.'
Pearce, who continues to claim he is innocent of any wrongdoing, is also facing seven rape charges for sexual assaults in unrelated cases that allegedly happened between 2005 and 2021.
He is accused of two counts of forcible rape and one count each of rape of an unconscious or asleep person and sexual penetration by a foreign object, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.