A model and her architect friend were left to die after leaving an LA party. An aspiring Hollywood producer is set to stand trial
The trial of Hollywood producer David Pearce, charged in the deaths of two women, begins this week. The mother of Christy Giles, one of the victims, believes he should be held responsible for their deaths. Andrea Cavallier takes a look back on what happened that night
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A model and her architect friend were suffering from overdoses when three masked men dumped their bodies outside separate hospitals after a warehouse party in Los Angeles.
Surveillance video from November 13, 2021, showed the men driving a Toyota Prius with no license plates as they dropped an unconscious 24-year-old Christy Giles off outside Culver City hospital, where she died of a fatal cocktail of drugs.
Hours later, Giles’ friend, Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, an architect and interior designer, was dumped outside a different LA-area hospital. She remained in the ICU for 10 days before dying of multiple organ failure and drug intoxication.
The men claimed to be good Samaritans who were “doing the right thing” by bringing the women to the hospital, one explained to a security guard, according to an affidavit.
A month later, David Pearce, a Hollywood producer who was seen at the party with the women and captured on camera as one of the masked men, was arrested. In July 2022 he was charged with their murders.
As his trial gets underway this week, Christy’s mother Dusty Giles speaks to legal analyst and trial attorney Kelly Hyman about why she believes Pearce should be held responsible for her daughter’s death.
“He came back and they searched on the internet how to get rid of a dead body/overdose body without getting in trouble,” she claimed in an exclusive clip shared with The Independent. “And they read it, and did what they found on the internet.”
The heartbroken mother’s voice broke when she talked about how her daughter was left to die.
“They claimed they didn’t know her,” she said. “They claimed that they found her in an alley and just saw her, and were good Samaritans ... and then threw her body. Just like they threw her body over their shoulder when they carried her out, like she was trash. That’s how it makes me feel.”
“She was a human being,” Dusty continued. “She was my daughter. She was a person. And neither Brandt or David saw her as anything but an object that they could play with.”
Hyman’s podcast Once Upon A Crime in Hollywood, which launches on January 6, delves into the case and promises to reveal startling revelations and new evidence as well as Pearce’s alleged history of drugging and accusations of sexually assaulting women.
Aside from interviews with the distraught families, Hyman also speaks with criminal defense attorney Joshua Ritter who reveals a shocking remark allegedly made by Pearce, according to DailyMail.com.
“Probably most crucial and damaging to Pearce, and perhaps even the reason why this case is a murder case, was a statement made by Pearce … where he said ‘dead girls can’t talk,’” Ritter says.
“And what that tells us is what he intended. He realized he could benefit and save himself if these girls were actually dead. Because if they survived, they could tell authorities what had taken place and he knew that would be the end of him. So that alone pushes this case, if there was ever a doubt, from manslaughter into a murder.”
What happened on the night Christy Giles and Hilda Cabrales-Arzola died?
In the early morning hours of November 13, 2021, Christy Giles texted her husband, Jan Cilliers, to let him know that she would be going with her friend Hilda to a warehouse party in East Los Angeles.
Christy had been at an art exhibit at the Soho House in West Hollywood that night where she had used cocaine and ketamine and smoked marijuana, a friend told police, according to the affidavit by Los Angeles Police Department Detective Jonathan Vander Lee.
The women arrived in an industrial part of East Los Angeles, where a rave was being held, around 1 a.m., which is when Christy texted her husband.
Cilliers told The New York Post that the message, which he received between midnight and 1 a.m. was “loving and affectionate.”
At some point during the party, the women became separated.
Hilda then met Pearce and the two had a picture taken together by a photographer.
The women met back up with each other around 4:21 am when Hilda texted Christy: “Do you want coke?”
According to an affidavit obtained by the Los Angeles Times, surveillance footage from the warehouse shows the two women leaving the party with the three suspects in their deaths: Pearce, Brandt Osborn, and Michael Ansbach.
They continued the party at Pearce’s apartment on Olympic Boulevard, the LAPD said.
At around 5:30 a.m., Christy reportedly messaged Hilda to say: “Let’s get out of here”, with a wide-eyed emoji.
She replied: “Yes. I’ll call an Uber. 10 min away.”
The Uber was spotted on video footage arriving at the address, and leaving five minutes later without the women.
Pearce was then seen carrying Christy’’s body to a Prius vehicle on the video footage, according to the police affidavit.
Detective Jonathan Vander Lee wrote that it was a “glaring fact” that both of the women had wanted to leave the property.
“The next time they are seen, they’re dead,” he said.
Christy’s body was left on the sidewalk outside Southern California Hospital in Culver City and Hilda was dumped outside Kaiser Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles two hours later.
Police reviewed surveillance video of a Toyota Prius with no license plate and determined it was the vehicle that the women had been in before being dumped by the masked men.
Christy was pronounced dead at the scene. Hilda was put on life support and suffered from multiple organ failure. She was taken off life support the day before her 27th birthday.
Both women had been drugged and died from “multiple drug intoxication,” and their deaths were ruled homicides by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Christy tested positive for cocaine, fentanyl, ketamine and the date rape drug GHB. Hilda had cocaine, MDMA and other drugs in her system.
Who is David Pearce?
David Pearce, now 40, is a freelance events planner and aspiring film producer, who met the women on the night of their deaths in 2021.
He 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, in connection to the deaths of the two women.
While in custody, Pearce was also charged with four sexual assaults in unrelated cases dating back to between 2010 and 2020.
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.
Pearce has been held in custody since his arrest and has denied the allegations and any wrongdoing in the deaths of the two women.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t do anything wrong, and obviously I’m not going to say anything that’s going to incriminate me,” he said, according to the affidavit.
He added that he had “watched, you know, people partaking in things that I had nothing to do with and I just tried to make the situation, you know, right.”
Who was Christy Giles?
Christy Giles was a model, social media influencer and aspiring actress, who worked as a model for Nomad and Fox modeling agencies.
Her mother Dusty Giles said she was signed by Wilhelmina modelling agency at the age of 14, and worked in London for a couple of months.
In 2013, she was a runner-up in Alabama Teen USA.
She grew up playing soccer and running and was a “rugged outdoors type” who rode horses, and liked to fish and shoot guns with her father, her mother has said.
Her mother added that her daughter was tough, explaining her father Leslie served as a military police officer in Iraq.
“My daughters have been taught literally how to kill a person with a ballpoint pen,” she said.
Christy met her friend Hilda while studying interior design in LA.
Christy and Jan Cilliers eloped in 2019 after meeting at an art gallery in Los Angeles but planned to have a wedding in Alabama with family. Christy was buried in the wedding dress she would never get to wear.
Her devastated husband previously shared with the Daily Mail how he found out something was wrong the day Christy died when he saw her iPhone location at the hospital.
Cilliers discovered that her phone had been at a home on Olympic Boulevard in the Beverly Grove neighborhood – which investigators later said belonged to Pearce – and then asked his Instagram followers for help.
“People got back to me with saying that this guy lives at this address and he’s a very like suspicious person, that there’s lots of things out on the internet about him, that he’s not a very savory character. … A lot of really terrible things have been written about him online,” Cilliers told CBS News in a previous interview.
When he later checked her text messages, he was able to piece together how Christy and Hilda texted about getting an Uber ride – which never happened.
Cilliers, who said that the arrest of Pearce was a “relief”, told People Magazine that his wife was “a really incredible, incredible human” and added, “I’ve never felt love so deeply, and I doubt I ever will again.”
Who was Hilda Cabrales-Arzola?
Hilda Cabrales-Arzola grew up in Mexico and graduated cum laude from the Universidad de Monterrey in 2019.
In an online professional profile, Cabrales-Arzola studied in South Korea before moving to Los Angeles in 2021.
She was working as an architectural project manager at RADCO management in Los Angeles at the time of her death, according to an online profile.
After her death, Cabrales-Arzola’s father Luis Cabrales Rivera called on the DA to bring murder charges against the three men.
“We want those people to spend the rest of their lives in prison and that they can’t hurt anyone ever again,” Cabrales Rivera told The US Sun from his home in Mexico.
Who else is charged in the case?
Brandt Osborn and Michael Ansbach, who along with Pearce, were captured on surveillance camera footage leaving the warehouse rave with both women, were also arrested in the case.
Osborn, an actor who has appeared in NCIS and Nurse Jackie, was charged with two counts of accessory after the fact. He has pleaded not guilty and was released on a $40,000 bond.
Osborn allegedly bragged about the wild night when he met the women.
“He told me how they’d partied, two girls came back to their place, and the girls had a bunch of drugs,” actor David Murrietta told the New York Post, adding Osborn said it was “the craziest weekend of my life.”
A third man, cinematographer Michael Ansbach, was originally arrested alongside the two others, and accused of being an accessory to manslaughter, but was not charged in the case.