Every Town - The Honolulu STRANGLER - Hawaii's First Serial Killer Was Never Caught

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Today we've got a wild unsolved case for you, one where the killer put his victims on display for the whole world to see. He fed off the fear, relished in it, and just let it rip through the entire state of Hawaii. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/Ihw2F8N3KfY 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. They'll tell you nothing bad ever happens in paradise. But for about a year in the mid-80s, the island of Oahu found out just how wrong that was. A women were being taken one at a time, snatched right up, only to turn up dead by the water with their hands bound behind them. And nobody saw anything, so nobody could stop it.

And the man doing it seemed to melt right back into the sunshine every single time, like he was never even there. Eventually, the police did find him, and they were dead certain they had their guy, and yet somehow they just never had enough to nail him down. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to every town where today, we've got a wild unsolved case for you, one with a killer put his victims on display for the whole world to see. And he fed off the fear, relished in it, and let it rip through the entire state of Hawaii. So, let's head out there now and dig into the case of the Honolulu Strangler. In 1986, life in Oahu was about as good as it got. Tourism was at an all-time high, the beaches were bumping, and Honolulu had this reputation as one of the most beautiful and welcoming cities anywhere on the planet.

And people didn't just go there on vacation, they fell in love with the place and never went back to the mainland. They sold their house, packed up to kids, and started over eight time zones from wherever they came from. You had military families all over the island too, sailors and soldiers raising their kids just a few blocks off the beach. But for a stretch of time in the mid-80s, something very dark was moving through that island. and the folks living in paradise were about to find out what I keep telling you on this show. Every town's got a dark side, even the ones that look like heaven.

And for this place, it all started on a Tuesday evening in January, 1986. The Honolulu Police Department got a call from the parents of Regina Sakamoto, and they were barely keeping it together. Regina was just 17, and she left for school that morning around 8, same as any other day, but that was the last anyone saw ever.

By the time they made that phone call, they already knew. And somewhere deep down in that place a parent never wants to look at something was very wrong. The police took the missing persons report, but whatever they had lined up for the next morning got thrown out the window. Because before they could even get going, another call came in early. This one was from a local fisherman who was out on the water, and he found the body of the body of the same. a young woman floating in Kihei Lagoon. The second the cops got down to that shoreline, they knew this was no accident. And Regina, she was naked from the waist down with her hands bound behind her back. There were ligature marks around her neck and tied around one of her ankles

was an electrical cord. The other end of it fastened to the rocks along the shore, anchoring her body right there to the land. Which men, whoever did this, didn't just toss her in the water and drive off, hoping she'd sink and disappear. They tied her down where the tide was bound to put her on display, and they wanted to show off to the world what they had done. Emergency responders pulled her in, moved her offside away from public eyes. Regina's mother was then brought in to make the identification, and she knew the second she laid eyes on her that was her little girl. The autopsy confirmed Regina had died from strangulation, and she'd been essayed. before she was killed.

When investigators started sitting down with the people who knew her, the last morning of her life slowly came into focus. As it turns out, she left the house right on time, but somewhere along the way she missed her bus. So she stopped at a pay phone, called her boyfriend to let him know she'd be late getting to school. Now, police confirmed that call actually happened, and it was the last time anybody ever heard her voice.

She never made it to school. And because nobody followed up on her empty desk, hours went by before a single person in her life, her own family included even realized she was gone. And nobody who knew her could make any sense of it. Regina was shy and sweet. She didn't have enemies and wasn't mixed up in anything. There was simply nobody in her world who seemed even remotely capable of doing this to her, which left detective staring down one very uncomfortable possibility.

And this was a stranger. Somebody who saw the girl and plucked her up out of her routine so that they could do what they did. And this was a major problem because not only was a 17-year-old girl now dead, but she wasn't the first. Regina wasn't even the first one pulled out of Kihei Lagoon. Just seven months before, Honolulu Police got a similar call, only this one wasn't from a fisherman. It was from a guy on his way to work who just so happened to take a... a detour that he'd never forget. He spotted a woman down at the water's edge and called it in. When police got there, the scene was rough. She'd been strangled with a ligature. Her hands were tied

behind her back. Within a day, they had a name. It was 25-year-old Vicki Purdy. And there were some differences between the two cases. And Vicky hadn't been tethered to anything, and she wasn't all the way in the water either. It looked more like her body had been shoved, down the embankment and left wherever it came to rest. Unlike Regina Vicky wasn't some teenager walking to a bus stop, she was a married woman. Her husband Gary was an army pilot, and by every account she had a full settled life.

But the way she vanished, well, that part felt awfully familiar. On the night of May 29th, Vicky had gone out with some friends. Nothing crazy. She was actually supposed to be home early, but she never walked through the door. And Gary started paging her once, twice, then over and over all through the night. Every single time he got nothing back. And by morning, he'd filed a missing person's report and gone out looking for himself.

He didn't find Vicky. What he found was her car, sitting abandoned in the parking lot of the hotel where she and her friends had parked that night. There was a fresh den in it, nobody could explain. No sign of her inside. No record of her ever renting a room. room there, just her car, sitting right where she left it. And police managed to track down a cab driver, who remembered dropping Vicky back at that exact lot around midnight. So she'd made it to her car, she'd been right there standing in the parking lot. And all while Gary was standing there,

staring at that dent, trying to make sense of it, police were clear across town taking a report about a woman's body down at the lagoon, and it was his wife. And they were still working. And they were still working Vicki's case by the time Regina turned up in that same lagoon seven months later. And then, on February 1st, police got called out yet again. A third woman had been found near Kihei Lagoon. This time, though, something a bit different. The body, it was wrapped up in a tarp. But when they pulled it back, her hands were bound behind her back.

Same as Vicky and same as Regina. And at that point, there was just no getting around it anymore. it was almost certainly a serial killer operating in beautiful Honolulu. A task force got put together on February 5th, and that same day, they released the name of the third victim, Denise Hughes. Denise was 21 years old, married to a sailor named Charles, who was stationed over at Pearl Harbor, and she'd been missing since January 30th. The night before she vanished, she had dinner with Charles on his ship, and had had her home around 10. About an hour after she left, he gave the house a call just to make sure she'd gotten

back all right, and she had. She picked up. She was home. Everything was fine. Except the next morning, she didn't show up for work. Her boss called Charles, and that's the moment he knew something wasn't right. He was just like Vicky, just like Regina. Denise had been there one minute and gone the next. Police officially put out a public warning telling women all over the island to be careful to watch their backs and not take rides from strangers, which, given what they were dealing with, felt like bare minimum. And that warning changed the whole feel of the island. I mean, this was Hawaii, sunshine, and palm trees, a postcard paradise people saved up for years just to see once. But underneath all that, a different version of the place had started to take hold.

Women stopped going out after dark on their own, and mothers waited up at the window for daughters who used to come and go as they please. The beaches were still packed in the daytime, but once that sun went down, the quiet kind of fear settled over the whole island. Everybody could feel it, and somewhere out there was a man who'd done this three times now, and nobody had the faintest eye down. who he was or where he'd turn up next. And still though, it wasn't enough, because just two months later on April 2nd, another body turned up. The fourth victim was 25-year-old Luis Medeiros.

But this time the killer changed things up because Louise wasn't found at Kihei Lagoon. She turned up, clear on the other side of things, near Wakhali Stream, tucked underneath a freeway overpass, about 12 miles from where the other girls been left. And when investigators looked up, they realized the drop from that overpass down to the ground was 95 feet. They believe that's exactly how she got there, thrown off the top like she was

nothing at all. She was partially nude, her hands tied behind her back, so same signature, same man. As to who that man was exactly, well, police didn't know, but they were starting to understand something about him. And think back to Regina, tied off to those rocks so the tide couldn't carry her out. Now Louise, thrown off an overpass in the open for anybody driving by to spot. He wasn't burying these women out in the woods where they'd never turn up. He was leaving them out there where the whole island would have to look at them. It's a guy killing to satisfy something in himself, sure, but he also wants the credit for it. wanted Honolulu scared, and that fear wasn't some side effect of what he was doing.

For him, the fear was the whole point, and you could feel it running through everybody on the island. Louise had been missing since March 26th. That night, she boarded a late flight back to Oahu after visiting family on Kauai. She was actually attending her mother's funeral. And while there, her and her sisters talked all about the killer and the women vanishing off the street and washing up dead. And so much, though, that they begged her to stay. And just one more night where she'd be safe and then she could fly home in the morning. They didn't want her standing around in the dark alone, waiting for a ride, didn't want to lose another family member.

A Louise had other kids at home waiting on her and she needed to get back to them. So she hugged her family goodbye and got on that plane. She was also three months pregnant at the time. And the last time anyone saw Louise Medeiros, she was standing at the airport bus stop waiting in the dark for her way home, exactly what her sisters have been afraid of. And then, almost like clockwork, just under a month after her body turned up under that bridge, another woman went missing. Her name was Linda Pesh, and she was 36 years old. When Linda's Toyota turned up abandoned on the Nimitz Highway on the night of April 30th, when nobody needed a whole lot of convincing that something bad had happened to her.

Her roommate reported her missing that very same night, and it took investigators about a day to connect that abandoned car to the missing woman. But once they did, they did something pretty clever. They had the car towed right back to the exact spot where it had been found, and then they started flagging down drivers. hundreds of them. Anybody who used that stretcher road asking the same thing over and over. Did you see this car or the woman driving it the night she disappeared? And what came back was real interesting.

More than one witness remembered seeing Linda's car pulled over on the side of the Nimitz with its hazard lights flashing, so her car had broken down. She was stranded out there on the side of the road in the dark, alone, and about as vulnerable as a person can be. And a few of those same witnesses remembered something else. A light-colored cargo van parked close by. And maybe with some lettering on the back window. Maybe not.

Nobody was 100%. Investigators put out a sketch of that van and then waited. A few days later, on May 2nd, they got a call from a man named Howard Gay. He told them he found bones out on Sand Island. this mostly empty stretch of land sitting right near Key High Lagoon. And then, almost like it was an afterthought, he mentioned that a psychic had told him Linda's body was out there as well.

So investigators sent a team, and Howard, he walked them straight to the bones. They turned out to be pig bones, so a bit of a letdown in terms of finding real evidence for this case. But, hey, they were already out there, so they had to look around. A Howard even hung around to help them search. Nothing else turned up, though, and eventually everybody packed it in and went home. But the very next day, somebody else called in from Sand Island. And that call let investigators write to Linda's body, flying somewhere between 75 and 150 feet from where they'd all been standing the day before,

looking at a pile of pig bones. She was naked, and her arms tied behind her back. And that's when it hit them. The day before, when Howard was right there helping them comb that island, he walked them in circles around that exact spot. He steered them clear of it every time they got close. This man, he knew precisely where Linda was the entire time. He wasn't there helping in the search.

He was playing with them and making sure they didn't find her. Around this time, investigators were going back through Linda's office. office. As she worked in sales, and at previous January, she spent her days canvassing the area right around the airport. And sitting there on her desk was a notepad, and written on that notepad was a name and a phone number, Howard Gay. Turns out, Linda had tried to sell him a pager, and Howard worked at a company right next to the airport called Flying Tiger Cargo, and that job came with access to a company vehicle, a white cargo van. one that, up until pretty recently, had the company's name printed across the rear window.

So they put Howard under surveillance, and here's where it gets good. By the time investigators released that sketch of the van on May 5th, they'd already sat and watched Howard scrape the lettering off the back of his. And the medical examiner had managed to recover semen samples from some of the victims, and right away something jumped out. The sperm count in those samples was strangely low, and some of them just a handful of cells, and at least one, none at all. And I told investigators something specific about their guy. Whoever did this, either had a serious reproductive problem or he'd had a vasectomy.

And Howard Gaye had a vasectomy. Problem was this was the 80s, and there was no DNA testing yet. None of the stuff we take for granted now. All they could do was test blood type, so that's what they did. And trouble is, blood type can really only rule people out and not nail them down. And Howard's blood type happened to be the most common one on the planet. So him matching it didn't mean a thing other than they couldn't cross him off the list. They arrested him anyway, but when investigators took everything they had over to the prosecutors

and pushed hard for an indictment, those prosecutors looked it over and said, no, it wasn't enough. not to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a jury. While they still had him in custody, they brought Howard in to the Criminal Investigation Division. They set him down for questioning. He was in that room for 10 hours, and over that time, every instinct the investigators had told them they were sitting across from their killer.

He wouldn't look any of them in the eye. He kept his arms crossed the whole time. Every single question seemed to wind him up a little tighter. And at the very end of it, Major Luis Sousa leaned in and asked him flat out. Did you murder Linda Pessie? Howard dropped his head and said, no, he didn't do it. He then agreed to take a polygraph, and he failed it. Investigators needed more, and they had to dig, and they needed to find something on him.

They searched his house, the van, his entire workplace, and went through every inch of all three, and they came up with nothing. Howard got himself an attorney who told him to stop talking, and just like that, it was over. Without enough to charge him, police had to let him go. And from there, the whole case started to come apart. Within a few months, the task force got cut down to half its size. Not long after that, they shut it down completely. But Howard didn't get to just stroll off and pick his life back up like none of it had happened. Because the police, they never stopped watching.

them. They tracked his movements around the clock. Everywhere he went, there was somebody keeping eyes on him. When he flew to the mainland, HPD went too. When he left the state for good, Honolulu police got on the phone with whatever local department was wherever he landed and asked them to pick up the watch. They were not done with Howard Gay, not even close. And over the years, Howard made his way up the East Coast. He spent some time. over in Europe, and by 2002, he settled down somewhere in the Midwest. And guess what? Investigators followed him every step of the way. And in every single city, he passed through, well, there were no victims, nothing that matched the pattern. So, did he know he was being watched? Did he stop?

Or was Howard Gay never the killer in the first place? Well, here's something that could help explain all of it, and it's extremely interesting. In June of 1986, not long after that last murder on Oahu, Howard's own son pulled over on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist, and while he was out there trying to lend a hand, an oncoming car hit him and killed him. So, the man investigators were convinced had been hunting vulnerable women, women whose cars had broken down in some cases, lost his own son because that boy stopped to help somebody in the exact same situation. And you couldn't write it. This is the kind of thing that doesn't feel like it

should be allowed to be true, and yet it is. And after he lost his son, well, Howard reportedly found religion. He became a born-again Christian, and for what most folks say, that faith turned into a real big part of the rest of his life. Did it change him? Did something in him finally break or shift? Well, I guess that's one more thing we'll never get to know. Because Howard Gay is gone now. He died in 2003 and he went to his grave, never having been charged with a single one of these murders, and nobody else has either. And so that's where this case sits today, officially unsolved. Five women, one suspect, everybody felt certain about and not one charge to show for it. Here's the thing, though. DNA technology has come a long way since 86.

Techniques that flat out did not exist back when these women were killed can now pull a usable profile off evidence that everybody once wrote off is too old and degraded. And with these genealogical DNA databases now, you don't even need a perfect sample anymore. A partial profile can be enough to point investigators toward a relative, and from that relative, straight to a suspect. Now, those semen samples taken from some of the victims, were always one of the strongest pieces of evidence anybody had in this whole case. Now, whether those samples still exist in a shape that today's technology could actually do something with, or whether anybody out there is even actively chasing that down right now, we don't really know.

But it is possible, and that's how this case gets solved. Howard Gay might be gone, but he still has a surviving son that we know of. if a usable profile is still sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, and that sun is in any database anywhere, and the science could go and do the one thing the justice system never managed to. And for Regina, Vicky, Denise, Louise, and for Linda, that one possibility is just about the only thing left that even resembles hope. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown.

I appreciate you tuning in. And if these are the kinds of stories you're into, then you're in the right place. We've got a ton more where this came from, so subscribe and take a look around. Remember to watch your backs out there and come on back next week for another new scary, strange, and mysterious story. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.