A native of Los Angeles, born in 1949, Tholmer was 26 years old at the time of his arrest for assaulting a police officer. A charge of rape was added, when his fingerprints were matched with those recovered from the apartment where a 79-year-old woman was attacked on October 22, 1975, and Tholmer later pled guilty to that crime, blaming his actions on an LSD "high." Suspected, but never charged, in a series of ten murders committed by the elusive "West Side Rapist," Tholmer spent three years in Patton State Hospital, undergoing treatment as a mentally disordered sex offender. Released in October 1979, he continued treatment as an out-patient at a rehabilitation center in suburban Silver Lake.

Memories of the West Side Rapist were revived from 1981 to '84, as homicide investigators probed the violent deaths of 32 elderly women around Los Angeles. Eighty-year-old Rose Lederman was one of the first to die, her body discovered in her Silver Lake home, within walking distance of Tholmer's rehab center, on August 13, 1981. It was November 1984 when task force officers examined Tholmer's file and noted similarities between his old M.0. and the procedures of their latest maniac-at-large. Surveillance was initiated on November 6, and Tholmer was arrested one day later, poised outside the bedroom window of an 85-year-old paraplegic.

Evidence collected by authorities linked Tholmer to merchandise stolen from Rose Lederman in 1981, and one of his shoes matched a footprint found at the home of 69-year-old Wolloomooloo Woodcock, murdered in August 1982. Suspected of 34 slayings in all, strongly connected with 12 through circumstantial evidence, Tholmer was ultimately charged with only four. A jury convicted him on all counts -- including charges of rape, sodomy, arson and burglary -- on July 25, 1986. Sentenced to four consecutive terms of life imprisonment, he is unlikely to be prosecuted for numerous other suspected murders.

(See also: "West Side Rapist")