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On the afternoon of Saturday, November 13, 2021, two young women were dropped off at two different hospitals in Los Angeles that were two miles apart from one another. The circumstances were highly suspicious; one of the women was dead on arrival while the other was actively dying, both from a drug overdose. Even more suspicious, the car that dropped each of the women off lacked license plates while two masked men were involved.
24-year-old model, Christy Giles, had been left outside the emergency room of Southern California Hospital in Culver City by two masked men who drove a black Toyota Prius that was lacking license plates. They acted as concerned Samaritans who told the hospital staff that they found the woman passed out on the curb & they were trying to help. They left without providing their names or phone numbers & sadly, despite their best efforts, Christy was pronounced dead on arrival.
Dusty Giles, Christy’s mom, was living in Corner, Alabama when she received the horrific phone call when she was told that her daughter was dead. When she was told that Christy’s cause of death was from a drug overdose, she fell apart.
Only two hours later, these same two men arrived in a black Toyota Prius that was lacking license plates. This time, they pulled up to Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center & with them was an unconscious 26-year-old woman named Hilda Cabrales, who was still alive. She was resuscitated & placed on life support, but sadly, she never regained consciousness. After fighting for eleven days, Hilda was removed from life support after she was declared brain dead on November 24, one day before she would have celebrated her 27th birthday.
Hilda’s mom, Dr. Hilda Marcela Arzola-Placencia, a doctor who lived in Mexico, recalls the horrible moment when her life changed forever when she received a phone call in the middle of the night. Medical staff explained that her daughter was intubated & critically ill. She & her husband, Hilda’s father, Luis Cabrales, rushed to California to be by their daughter’s side where they remained until she passed. When Hilda’s family made the decision to donate their daughter’s organs, the medical staff lined the hallways & clapped to honor & thank Hilda for helping others as she was taken to the OR.
24-year-old Christy Giles had been a model & aspiring actress from Alabama who, according to her sister, Misty Weldon, had a personality that was big & loud, but you just couldn’t help but love her for it. She lived her life to the fullest & had a passion for adventure; she went skydiving, rode camels in Morocco & had been building a life in L.A. as a high fashion model. She worked with Wilhelmina modeling agency in addition to studying interior design.
At only 21, after dating her boyfriend for seven months, Christy married Jan Cilliers, a South African artist who was 17 years her senior. Since Christy knew that life can be very short, on a whim, when they were at a Burning Man festival in Nevada, they began discussing their future when they proposed to each other one day & were married the next day.
When Christy’s parents found out she’d eloped, they were upset that they hadn’t been there, that her father didn’t get the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle. Christy assured her parents that despite the fact that she & Jan were legally married, they still planned on having a big wedding in Alabama.
It was after Christy was married when she began studying interior design in L.A. that she crossed paths with Hilda Cabrales & they became friends.
26-year-old Hilda Marcela Cabrales was an architect & interior designer who had relocated from Mexico to L.A. to pursue her dream job. She was exceptionally close with her family & spoke with her father on a daily basis. According to her friends, everything she did, she did 100%. She was a summa cum laude graduate from a university in Monterrey Mexico who loved to dance, dress up & travel & had visited 22 countries before she moved to L.A.
On Friday, November 12, 2021, Christy enjoyed the sunset at the beach with her cat, Loki & sent her husband a selfie with Loki with the caption, me and the sand panther together 4ever. Since Jan was away, visiting his father in San Francisco, she texted him, I wish you were here. Later that night, she & Hilda headed out for a girl’s night on the town in L.A.
They started at the Soho House in West Hollywood for an art exhibit & then headed to a warehouse party to see one of their favorite DJs in East L.A. Social media videos depicted the girls dancing in the VIP section & friends later told investigators that earlier that night, they’d taken ketamine.
While they were out, Hilda texted Christy, Do you want coke? She said that she did & Hilda told her that she was in the kitchen & wrote, Let’s do a line. A witness said they saw a 39-year-old man named David Pearce, who considered himself an entertainment professional, give the woman something that resembled cocaine. He was there with his actor friend & roommate, 42-year-old Brandt Osborn as well as a photographer, 47-year-old Michael Ansbach.
Surveillance footage depicted the women leaving the club at about 5 am with David, Brandt & Michael.
They headed to David’s apartment on West Olympic Boulevard, arriving just after 5:10 am. Investigators later learned that only 20 minutes later, Christy texted Hilda at 5:30 am, Let’s get out of here with a wide-eyed emoji, making it clear that they were ready to leave. Hilda responded, Yes. I’ll call an Uber. 10 min away.
However, when the Uber arrived, the driver waited five minutes & when no one came out, they left.
Meanwhile, when Jan woke up at 7 am, he sent Christy a text to check in, but she never responded. Although he knew that she was out with HIlda the night before & was likely just sleeping in, he started to get the feeling that something wasn’t right so he started doing a little digging. He checked their shared phone location & saw that Christy was at an address he didn’t recognize at 8641 West Olympic Boulevard. Hours continued to tick by as his worry continued to grow when Christy’s location suddenly shifted to the emergency room of a hospital. This was when the true panic began for Jan.
Jan immediately called Christy’s parents with this information & only a short time later, he learned that his young wife of only two years had died after she’d been dropped off outside the hospital. When he was told she died from an overdose, it immediately didn’t add up to him since he knew it wasn’t something she would have ever done to herself.
When Jan heard the news that Hilda had also been dropped off at a neighboring hospital two hours after Christy by the same two masked men & she had also suffered from a drug overdose & was dying, alarm bells started going off in his head.
When Jan posted the address he hadn’t recognized, David’s apartment, to Instagram, asking for help, replies quickly started coming in. Those that recognized the address & knew the man who lived there, let Jan know that David was a very unsavory person & there was a lot of stuff on the internet about him.
Cell tower records later confirmed that both women’s phones stayed at David’s address for many hours before they were finally taken to the hospitals.
When Jan logged onto his wife’s laptop, he could see her history of text messages & the fact that she & Hilda planned to leave the apartment & catch an Uber, a ride that never happened, but why? The fact that they were texting each other while they were at the same location was also concerning.
Jan handed as much information as he could to detectives in order to get to the bottom of what led to his wife’s death. He began to put a timeline together as to how Christy & Hilda’s night had transpired with the information he learned through social media posts & connecting the dots through conversations with friends.
As he reached out to anyone he could at the events Christy attended that night, Jan found photos of three men hanging out with his wife & Hilda. He also obtained surveillance from outside the club where his wife was last seen alive which depicted Christy & Hilda leaving at 4:51 am on Saturday.
Detectives Johnathan Vander Lee & Calvin You were soon able to link the black Prius seen in the surveillance videos from the hospitals to David Pearce. When they arrived at the apartment he shared with his roommate, Brandt Osborn, a little after midnight on November 14 to confront him, the lights that had previously been on, suddenly turned off.
While they waited for the man to come out of his second floor apartment, the detectives were able to interview David’s neighbors, who shared some concerning stories. One neighbor indicated hearing moaning sounds & what sounded like someone in distress coming from his apartment on & off for six hours on Saturday morning. Police believe this was Hilda, yet none of the three men inside the apartment at the time called for help. Another heard a woman’s voice repeatedly saying, No, at about 6:30 am. This was about an hour after the Uber had come & gone.
Detectives discovered that David had a registration for a black Prius which they found parked behind the building that matched the car in the hospitals’ surveillance footage. The two men who had dropped Christy & Hilda off were David & Brandt.
When David finally opened the door to his apartment after the detectives had waited for about fifteen minutes, he lied & told them that he didn’t own a Prius, something they knew was a lie. When David finally admitted to owning a Prius, he told the investigators that the license plates had been stolen. This was another lie since they saw the plates laying on the ground by the car.
It was clear that David was not being honest as not only did he lie about his car, but his story changed multiple times in regards to the timeline of events & whether the girls had been at their apartment at all.
When Brandt finally admitted that the women had been at their apartment, he said that he was asleep & when he woke up, he found Christy & Hilda in distress. The men specifically chose to drop the women off at two separate hospitals because they didn’t know how it would look.
When David & Brandt agreed to let the officers take a look around their apartment, they found that the beds had been stripped of their bedding, the washing machine was actively running & there was a safe that contained baggies. The drugs they found inside the baggies matched what staff at the hospitals confirmed was in both Christy & Hilda’s systems. The witness statements paired with the digital trail as well as the physical evidence made investigators believe that David had drugged the women, but at that point, they didn’t yet have enough evidence to make an arrest.
According to Christy’s autopsy, in addition to ketamine, she also had cocaine, fentanyl & GHB, otherwise known as the date rape drug, in her system. Meanwhile, Hilda was positive for cocaine, MDMA/ecstasy & fentanyl, but not GHB. Both women’s bodies also showed signs of a sexual assault. According to Hilda’s family, she was typically an early to bed, early to rise girl & they were adamant that she would have never mixed such a deadly cocktail of drugs.
According to Detective You, David had been on law enforcement’s radar for years after they’d investigated at least three sexual assault reports in 2014 & 2020. In 2020, he sexually assaulted a 19-year-old when she was unconscious after he’d given her drugs to incapacitate her during their date. However, none of these cases led to charges at the time. He typically lured women by posing as a Hollywood producer or a doctor & he would often introduce himself as Dave from Paramount Pictures, regardless of the fact that he was only an intern. He would name-drop about his connections before he offered his date a special drink that would incapacitate her & he would then sexually assault them.
According to investigators, prosecuting drug-related sexual assault cases is difficult since victims often have fragmented memories & delays in reporting can make evidence collection difficult, if not impossible. When a victim is recreationally using drugs, it’s extremely difficult to prove that a crime took place.
Slowly but surely, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall together. In regards to Hilda’s text to Christy, when she asked if she wanted coke, although Christy had agreed, Jan indicated that this was not a common choice for her. He suspected that since it was late, she wanted to be less tired, but she certainly wasn’t a regular user.
After they entered David’s apartment a little after 5 am, Christy & Hilda weren’t seen for another eleven hours. Grainy footage from the top of the stairs showed David carrying Chrisy over his shoulder at 4:30 pm while Brandt carried her bag. 35 minutes later, David, who was wearing a black sweatshirt, helped take her body out of the car at the hospital while Brandt stood by watching.
An hour-&-a-half later, a dark image showed them leaving the apartment again, this time, with Hilda. While David carried her, Brandt carried her boots & coat. Thirty minutes later, they arrived at the second hospital where they took her out of the car together.
At this point, thirteen hours had gone by since Christy texted Hilda that they should leave the apartment & they ordered their Uber.
While police continued to build their case, Jan was notified that David & Brandt appeared to be moving. When Jan went to their apartment, he ended up recording a video of them loading up a moving van only one day after Hilda died. Police learned that David also changed his phone number & it took a week for them to locate him again.
On December 15, 2021, a little over one month after Christy & Hilda’s deaths, David, Brandt & Michael were arrested despite the fact that they still had no idea what transpired inside that apartment. Once in custody, they questioned them one-by-one. While they questioned Michael, they secretly recorded David & Brandt & they could hear David say, I hope Ansbach is not up there telling them I gave them drugs & wine.
Despite this statement, during his interview David denied ever giving the women drugs, but he volunteered the information that he had heard there’d been a bad batch of fentanyl going around. The officers found this statement to be suspicious since the fact that the women had likely died from fentanyl had never been released.
Brandt & Michael were soon released, but David remained behind bars for unrelated sexual assault charges with three more added as more women began coming forward.
In July 2022, after seven months of investigation, David was charged with two counts of first-degree felony murder while Brandt was charged with two counts of accessory after the fact. Meanwhile, Michael became a key witness for the prosecution until his charges were eventually dropped. He told investigators that David offered the women a ride to an after party, but told them that he needed to make a quick stop at his apartment. Once they were there, he was insistent that they stay & have a drink & when the women began to discuss leaving, David gave him as well as Christy & Hilda, something he called his special cocaine.
According to Michael, as soon as they took the drug that was offered he, Christy & Hilda were immediately sick & when he woke up hours later, he saw Christy without any signs of life. This was when he told David & Brandt to take the women to the hospital, but David continued to say, dead girls don’t talk.
David & Brandt’s trials began on January 9, 2025, a little over three years after Christy & Hilda’s deaths. Prosecutor Catherine Mariano presented the forensic evidence & toxicology results to make her case which proved that fentanyl was found in both women while GHB was also in Christy. David’s DNA was also found on Christy’s body as well as under Hilda’s fingernails.
In order to prove felony murder, the prosecution needed to prove that David incapacitated the women in order to rape them. Because they weren’t alive to testify, she needed to rely on the testimony of others to prove he had a history of this behavior of spiking women’s drinks with drugs & then sexually assaulting them.
The defense argued that Christy & Hilda had each been using drugs even before meeting up with the three men that night, stating that there was no case for murder.
The women who came forward to investigators to report their experience with David chose to remain anonymous. One woman is Jackie, otherwise known as Jane Doe #2, who met David in 2010 when she was a 24-year-old law student who was looking for a room to rent. When she toured his apartment on West Olympic Boulevard, he offered her a drink. Very quickly after consuming the beverage, the room began to spin & she felt disoriented. The next thing she knew, David was trying to rape her. When she began to fight him off, he threw her to the floor & punched her in the face.
David smashed the phone out of Jackie’s hand when she tried to call for help & she had to crawl down the stairs of the apartment for help since she was so disoriented & dizzy that he couldn’t walk. Because she was traumatized by the attack, she chose not to report it. Now hearing about Christy & Hilda, she decided to come forward & in total, twenty women ended up coming forward.
During the trial, victims continued to bravely testify about their traumatic experience with David Pearce. Michael Ansbach also testified & discussed how he had gotten violently ill after he ingested the cocaine he, Christy & Hilda had been given. When he woke up, David asked him to check on Christy, who didn’t appear to be breathing. He found Hilda in David’s bedroom. This was when David told him that dead girls don’t talk. Like David & Brandt, Michael also hadn’t called for help.
David, who had pleaded not guilty, testified on the eleventh day of the trial & denied every accusation against him. On the twelfth day, Brandt, who also pleaded not guilty, testified. Although evidence suggested that he helped with the aftermath, he claimed that he was dumbfounded by David’s behavior. He said he played no role in the cover-up since he was unsure of the extent of what was really going on.
The prosecution remained firm on the fact that just because Christy & Hilda had done drugs on their own that night, didn’t make them responsible for their own deaths. Prosecutor Mariano maintained that he didn’t care about drugging or violating the women or that they could die, he was actually relieved that they could die since dead girls don’t talk.
After two days of deliberation, the jury was back with a verdict on February 4, 2025 & they found David Pearce guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Christy & Hilda as well as the sexual assaults of all seven Jane Does.
Although David was charged with seven sexual assaults, this is likely just a fraction of women who have suffered at his hands. Based on the people he’s spoken with, Detective Calvin You believes the number could be as high as 100.
To Christy & Hilda’s family’s dismay, the jury was deadlocked for Brandt Osborn & a mistrial was declared. He was present when the women became ill & did nothing to help save their lives.
On Wednesday, October 29, 2025, David Pearce was sentenced to 146 years to life in prison for seven sexual assaults as well as the fentanyl-induced murders of Christy & Hilda. He was also ordered to register as a lifetime sex offender.
Pretrial hearings are being held in L.A. while prosecutors consider retrying a now 45-year-old Brandt Osborn. A new trial is expected to take place with a scheduled pretrial on November 18.
Following the verdict, Christy’s mom, Dusty Giles, spoke out about how Christy & Hilda were soul sisters who each lost their soul at the hands of the same man, in the same way & that they would be forever intertwined. She urges others to share their location technology with loved ones since you never know when you might not be able to get in touch with someone. This was something that allowed Jan to see where his wife was & for how long.
Both Christy & Hilda had come to L.A. to pursue their dreams. They were gorgeous young women who loved their families, their animals & their lives. They were free spirits who loved life & lost their lives far too soon. Jan Cilliers wants his wife to be remembered as the bright, beautiful soul that Christy was. Hilda’s sister, Fernanda, wants her to be remembered as someone who had many dreams & ambitions, she was intelligent, funny & happy to be alive.
If you or someone you know is a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Call 800-656-4673 or visit RAINN.org.
References:
- CBS News: The heartbreaking last photo a fashion model sent to her husband
- CBS News: Survivors speak up for victims to help convict Los Angeles man of murder, sexual assault
- The U.S. Sun: No way out: Hollywood producer’s ex-lawyer breaks silence on sick bid to evade life in jail just before sentencing for model’s death
- Medium: The murders of Christy Giles & Hilda Cabrales “Dead Girls Don’t Talk”
- Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office: David Pearce sentenced to 146 years to life in prison for fentanyl overdose deaths of two women in Beverly Hills
