In the winter of 1986, the life of 35-year-old Lorna Patricia Reed was tragically cut short, her body discovered in the brush of an isolated area of Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas, California. On Tuesday, February 11, 1986, the partly clad remains of the Pomona woman were found, sending a chill through the San Gabriel Valley. An autopsy would later confirm that she had been strangled.
At the time of the discovery, investigators noted troubling similarities to a string of unsolved murders that had been plaguing South-Central Los Angeles, leading them to suspect she might be the 16th victim of an elusive serial killer. Reed, a Black female, fit the profile of the other victims, most of whom were prostitutes. The placement of her body in a secluded park also mirrored the pattern of the other slayings.
Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who were part of a joint task force, theorized that the increased police presence and public attention in the primary killing ground of South-Central Los Angeles might have pushed the killer to a new territory. The investigation into Reed's murder led detectives to canvas Pomona's Holt Avenue, a known area for streetwalkers, in the hopes of finding witnesses who may have seen her or her killer on the night she was believed to have died, sometime between 10 p.m. Monday and 2 a.m. Tuesday. The description of the serial killer they were working with was that of a Black man, between 28 and 36 years old, with a muscular build. For years, Lorna Patricia Reed's case remained unsolved, one of many that haunted the region.
The break in the case would not come for many years, a testament to the persistent and often slow march of justice. The man responsible for Lorna Patricia Reed's death, along with a multitude of other brutal killings, was Ivan Jerome Hill, a man who would come to be known as "The 60 Freeway Killer." Hill's reign of terror stretched from 1986 to 1994, during which he raped and murdered at least eight women, dumping their bodies along the desolate stretches of California State Route 60. It was through the power of DNA profiling that investigators were finally able to connect Hill to the series of murders, nearly a decade after his last known crime. While already serving a sentence for other crimes, a blood sample taken from Hill in 1994 would eventually be his undoing. In 2003, his DNA profile was matched to evidence left at the scenes of several unsolved murders. On November 17, 2006, Hill was convicted on six counts of murder and was subsequently sentenced to death in 2007. It wasn't until May 15, 2009, that Ivan Hill pleaded guilty to the murders of Lorna Reed and another woman, Rhonda Jackson, who was killed in 1987. His guilty plea officially closed the book on the long-unsolved murder of Lorna Patricia Reed, bringing a measure of resolution to a case that had remained a painful mystery for over two decades.
