David Pearce convicted in Los Angeles murders and rape spree

Seven women took the stand and changed the shape of the case against David Pearce. What began as a prosecution over the deaths of Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola became a wider account of predatory behavior, with jurors finding Pearce guilty not only of two murders but also of raping and sexually assaulting seven other women over more than a decade.

Jurors convicted Pearce on February 4, 2025, of two counts of first-degree murder in the fentanyl overdose deaths of Giles, 24, and Cabrales-Arzola, 26. Prosecutors said Pearce supplied GHB and fentanyl at his Beverly Hills apartment after meeting the women at a warehouse party in East Los Angeles around 3 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2021. The two women were dropped off at separate hospitals about two hours apart. Giles was already dead when taken to Southern California Hospital in Culver City, while Cabrales-Arzola was alive but critically ill at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Hospital and died 11 days later, one day before her 27th birthday.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said the case was investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department and prosecuted by its Sex Crimes Division. Along with the murder convictions, Pearce was found guilty of rape and other sexual assaults against seven different women between 2007 and 2021. The charges included forcible rape, sexual penetration by force, sodomy by force, rape of an unconscious woman and sexual penetration by foreign object. The testimony from those survivors mattered because it allowed prosecutors to show Pearce not as a defendant tied only to two deaths, but as a serial abuser whose conduct stretched across years.

The verdict also carried a sentencing consequence meant to keep him under lifelong supervision. On Oct. 29, 2025, Pearce received a sentence of 146 years to life in state prison and was ordered to register as a lifetime sex offender. The case has underscored how drug-facilitated sexual violence can hide behind party culture, overdoses and fragmented accounts, and why survivor testimony can become central when the victims most directly harmed can no longer speak for themselves.

Pearce’s co-defendant, Brandt Osborn, was not resolved in the same way. Jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict on accessory-to-murder charges, and a new trial was expected, with a pretrial date set for Nov. 18 in Department 109 at the Foltz Criminal Courthouse.