On August 19, 1980, the body of a 25-year-old woman named Sonia Smith was discovered in an industrial wasteland area of South Los Angeles, California. She was found naked, and her wrists and ankles had been bound. The Los Angeles County Coroner later determined that she had been strangled to death. Sonia's life and the full story of who she was have been largely obscured by the tragic circumstances of her death, but the investigation into her murder would eventually unravel a series of violent crimes spanning two decades.
Less than three months after Sonia's death, on November 4, 1980, the body of another 25-year-old woman, Phyllis McClinton, was found in a similar state. She, too, was discovered in an abandoned field, bound and strangled. The striking similarities in the two cases led Los Angeles Police Department detectives to believe the murders were connected. A significant breakthrough occurred later that same month when another woman came forward. She reported being assaulted, choked, and bound in a manner terrifyingly similar to how Smith and McClinton were found. She managed to escape her attacker and identified him to police as Larry D. Hubbard.
Hubbard, who was married and working as a self-employed janitor, was arrested. However, he was only charged with false imprisonment in the survivor's case. He was convicted and sentenced to just six months in prison and four years of probation. At the time, law enforcement did not have the evidence to connect him to the murders of Sonia Smith and Phyllis McClinton. What they also didn't know was that Hubbard was a fugitive. He had been convicted of robbery with a deadly weapon in Miami in 1974 and sentenced to six years in prison, but he escaped on December 2, 1977, and made his way to California.
The cases of Sonia Smith and Phyllis McClinton went cold. For two decades, there were no new leads. Then, in 2000, the pattern of violence resurfaced. On August 11, 2000, the body of 45-year-old Vanessa Williams was found strangled in a vacant field in Pomona. Two months later, on October 14, the body of 27-year-old Christine Fields was discovered in a field in Riverside County, also strangled. Detectives from the Pomona Police Department and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department noted the similarities and began working together, discovering both women were from Pomona and had similar backgrounds.
It was the advancement of DNA technology that finally began to connect the disparate cases. In 2007, a partial DNA profile that had been developed from evidence collected in Sonia Smith's case was linked to the murders of Williams and Fields. As LAPD cold case detectives from the Robbery-Homicide Division re-examined Sonia's murder file in 2010, they revisited the old link to Phyllis McClinton's death and the suspect from 1980: Larry Hubbard. The pieces of a decades-long puzzle were starting to fall into place.
By this time, Hubbard's life on the run had come to an end. On May 22, 2007, he was arrested by police in Ontario, California, on the outstanding warrant for his 1977 prison escape in Florida. He was extradited back to Florida, but before he could face justice for his original crimes or be charged with the string of murders he was now suspected of, Hubbard attempted to hang himself in his cell. On January 13, 2008, he died from complications of his suicide attempt. He was 55 years old.
Though Hubbard was dead, investigators were determined to officially close the cases. In September 2011, LAPD detectives obtained a biological sample from Hubbard's body from the Florida coroner. On June 22, 2012, they received confirmation: Larry Hubbard's DNA was a match to the evidence found on Sonia Smith. Investigators announced that the man who had escaped justice for over 30 years was responsible for the murders of Sonia Smith, Vanessa Williams, and Christine Fields, and he remains the prime suspect in the death of Phyllis McClinton. Authorities believe he may have been responsible for other murders and have asked anyone with information to contact the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division's Cold Case Special Section at (213) 486-6810.
