Cold Storage Killer:John Famalaro·Denise Huber

Denise Huber was 23 and lived in Newport Beach, California. In the early hours of June 3, 1991, after a concert in Inglewood and dropping a friend at home, she was driving south when her Honda got a flat tire. Her car turned up that evening on the Corona del Mar Freeway, but Denise was gone. The search for her went on for three years without answers.

In July 1994, a Phoenix couple who ran a paint supply business met a man named John Famalaro at a swap meet in Prescott, Arizona, and went to his home in Dewey to buy more paint. A Ryder truck sitting in his driveway struck them as odd, and they passed its plate number to a police detective they knew. The truck had been stolen from Orange County months earlier. On July 13, investigators opened a locked freezer inside it and found Denise’s body. She had died from repeated blows to the head. Her clothing and belongings were in boxes at Famalaro’s house, along with the tools used to kill her.

In 1997, an Orange County jury convicted Famalaro of first-degree murder with special circumstances for kidnapping and a sexual offense, and he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the sentence in July 2011. California has carried out no executions since Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 moratorium.