Hughes often posed his victims in provocative ways, which set him apart from other serial killers roaming the streets of South Los Angeles at the time.
“He’s trying to shock whoever finds the body,” former Los Angeles Police Department cold case detective Cliff Shepherd once told The Daily Beast. “We believe that there may have been some event in his life that initiated his behavior, and then he decided to commit violence against a number of women.”
Hughes was born in Michigan and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. After spending time in the Navy and being imprisoned for theft and perjury, he returned to Los Angeles and took a series of odd jobs, including working as a security guard and selling Christmas trees near Los Angeles International Airport.
He was first implicated in the murders of four women, Teresa Ballard, Brenda Bradley, Terry Miles, and Jamie Harrington, in November 1993, when he carried Harrington’s body on a Culver City street. This happened after a witness spotted him pushing a shopping cart.
Hughes left the body in the parking lot.
“Jamie’s wrists were secured with rope and there was also torn cloth that was used to secure her to the shopping cart,” Shepherd told Serial Killer Capital: Los Angeles.
A witness saw Hughes pushing the cart and was able to identify him to police. His fingerprints were later found on a shopping cart and later used to link him to two other murders, while detectives found documents with his name on them at the scene of the fourth murder.
Just a week before Harrington’s body was discovered, detectives discovered the body of Terry Miles in another parking lot in nearby Culver City. She was sexually assaulted half-naked and strangled to death.
Her niece Liaelle Miles described her in Serial Killer Capital: Los Angeles as “always upbeat and energetic.”
RELATED: Florida firefighter’s wife found naked, bludgeoned and stabbed to death, suspect was an acquaintance
“Although she was always smiling and laughing, she had some tough times,” Liael said. “My aunt lived on the streets sometimes. She ended up living with the various boyfriends she had. My mother always carried the guilt of not being good enough. But my aunt just wanted to be free and didn’t want to follow the rules.”
Her murder devastated the family.
“I just remember my mother screaming and crying,” said Liael, who struggled with the guilt of not doing more for her sister. “I had lost a part of my mother for several years. ” he added.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Hughes was convicted of four murders in 1998. Ten years later, DNA evidence left at several other crime scenes implicated him in three more murders.
Hughes was then found guilty in 2011 of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for the deaths of Yvonne Coleman, Verna Williams and Deborah Jackson, according to CBS News.
Coleman, the youngest victim, was just 15 when she skipped school in January 1986 to spend time with her boyfriend. On her way home, she encountered Hughes, who raped and killed the boy and left his body near a barbecue, the Daily Beast reported.
Williams was found dead five months later at 68th Street Elementary School.
“Her body was placed on top of the stairwell, her legs bent and spread, naked from the waist down,” Shepherd said in the special.
The students stumbled over the body and called the police.
“He had no qualms about letting her spread out on the school grounds for the kids to find,” said Paul Coulter, a former Los Angeles Police Department robbery-homicide detective.
Jackson, the last victim connected to Hughes, was found dead outside a paint store in Mid-Wilshire on June 24, 1993, according to the Los Angeles Times.
