Kristi Johnson was a 21-year-old aspiring actress in Los Angeles. In February 2003, she vanished after meeting a man who promised her a film role. The case exposed a predator with a long criminal history.
Kristine Louise Johnson was born on February 27, 1981, in Los Gatos, California. In 1987, her family moved to Saugatuck, Michigan, where she grew up. Her mother, Terry Hall, later described her as calm and easy to be around.
She graduated from Saugatuck High School in 1999 and went on to attend Western Michigan University. In 2000, she moved to Santa Maria, California, to live with her grandmother and attend junior college.
While there, she worked as a production assistant on the Sandra Bullock film “Murder by Numbers,” which sparked her interest in the entertainment business.
She later moved to the Los Angeles area, enrolled in a makeup and design school in Burbank, and took a job at a cell phone company to support herself while pursuing acting and modeling work.
She spent much of her free time handing out headshots and resumes. By July 2002, she had booked a job on a music video. She wrote to her father, Kirk, that she had been nervous when she first arrived in California but had decided to stay and keep trying.
On February 15, 2003, the day after Valentine’s Day, Johnson called her mother, Terry Hall, and said she was going to the mall. Hall told her not to buy anything for herself, since it could count as her Valentine’s gift.
At the Westfield Century City Mall, a man approached Johnson and introduced himself as a casting agent. He told her the studio was casting for the next James Bond film and that she had the look producers wanted.
He instructed her to buy a specific outfit for a same-day audition: a black miniskirt, a white men’s dress shirt, sheer pantyhose, and black stiletto heels, with her hair pulled into a tight ponytail. He said he would bring a necktie for her to wear.
Johnson bought the items, a purchase later confirmed through mall security footage and a store receipt. That evening, she told her roommate about the offer and showed her the clothes, saying she was excited but a little nervous. She then drove off in her white Mazda Miata for the audition and did not return.
Because Johnson had only lived with her roommate for a couple of months, the two were not yet familiar with each other’s routines, so her absence that first night did not raise alarm. By the following Monday, February 17, Johnson had missed a shift at work.
Unable to reach her by cell phone or her work line, Hall called the Santa Monica Police Department and filed a missing person report. Detective Virginia Obenchain took the case. She learned from the roommate about the audition story and grew concerned.
Investigators searched Johnson’s apartment and found a receipt for the stiletto shoes. Mall security video showed her buying the skirt, but no footage showed her with the man she had described.
Phone records showed her cell phone had last been active around 5:32 p.m. on February 15, with the signal coming not from Beverly Hills, where she believed her audition was, but from the hills above Laurel Canyon.
While driving through that area, Johnson had stopped at the Hollywood Hills home of celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland to ask for directions. Kirkland later said she looked lost and in a hurry. After that stop, there was no further activity on her phone or bank accounts.
On February 26, 2003, Johnson’s 22nd birthday, she had been missing for 11 days. Her family held a candlelight vigil while the search continued.
Police held a press conference asking for information, which led to hundreds of calls on a tip line. One caller was Susan Murphy, who said a man had approached her about three weeks earlier at the same mall.
He introduced himself as Victor Thomas and said he was a director of photography casting for the new Bond film. He told her to wear the same outfit Johnson had later been told to buy.
Murphy brought her boyfriend, who waited in the car, while she walked to meet the man at a building that looked abandoned. When she asked to see identification, he claimed he had left it “on the set.”
She signaled to her boyfriend, and the man grew angry, told her she was not right for the part, and walked off. Murphy’s description helped police build a composite sketch.
Actress Cathy DeBuono also came forward, saying a man calling himself “Brian from Disney” had approached her in 1998 with a nearly identical offer; she had brought a male friend to a meeting spot he chose, but the man never showed up.
Alice Walker, a waitress at the mall, said the same man had approached her on January 25, 2003, calling himself Victor and offering her $200,000 to play a role in the film. She met him at what he called his office, where he asked her to pose for photos and then tightened a necktie around her neck before she managed to leave.
A real estate agent told police he had shown a client named Victor ten houses in the Hollywood Hills in early February. The client had asked him to step outside the rooms so he could test whether shouting could be heard from inside, saying he wanted to check the soundproofing.
After the composite sketch was released to the media, a parole officer called police and said she recognized one of her own parolees: Victor Paleologus, a 40-year-old man with no real ties to the film industry.
Two days after Johnson disappeared, Paleologus had been arrested in Beverly Hills for trying to steal a BMW and was already being held at the county jail on a grand theft auto charge. Detectives went to question him about Johnson.
He denied any connection to her and changed the subject whenever they brought up her name, saying only that he was writing a book.
On February 24, 2003, Johnson’s white Mazda Miata was found parked at the valet stand of the St. Regis Hotel in Century City. The valet said a man had handed him the keys.
Investigators tested the car for evidence but found it clean except for one of Johnson’s own fingerprints. The valet was shown a police lineup but could not confirm who had left the keys. Murphy was shown the same lineup and identified Paleologus as the man who had lured her to the fake audition.
On March 3, 2003, hikers in the Hollywood Hills found a badly decomposed body in a ravine, roughly 100 feet below a trail near Skyline Drive, not far from one of the homes the real estate agent had shown Paleologus.
Detective Obenchain was lowered into the ravine and identified the body through a hibiscus tattoo on the lower back as Kristi Johnson. Her hands and ankles were bound, and she was partially wrapped in a sleeping bag.
She had been strangled and had suffered a skull fracture. Weeks of heavy rain had washed away any usable DNA, fingerprints, or fibers.
The coroner determined the head injury happened near the time of death, meaning Johnson may still have been alive when her body went into the ravine. Because of the decomposition, investigators could not determine whether she had been sexually assaulted.
Based on the discovery of the body and the accounts gathered from other women, Paleologus was charged with the kidnapping and murder of Kristi Johnson. Prosecutors also filed related charges of grand theft auto, identity theft, forgery, and filing a false financial statement.
As the case developed, investigators and reporters uncovered a pattern stretching back more than a decade. Paleologus had long presented himself as a record company executive, a movie producer, and a casting director, though he was in fact a failed restaurant owner with no genuine industry connections.
In 1989, he approached 21-year-old actress Christine Kludjian, telling her he worked for Columbia Records, and invited her to a hotel suite for what he described as an industry party. Once inside, he attacked her, pulling ropes out from behind the bed.
“He’s trying to kiss me, and I pushed him away,” Kludjian later said of the assault. She escaped after biting him. He was tried for attempted rape, but the jury deadlocked, and he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of false imprisonment, receiving probation.
A juror on that case later said Paleologus did not look like a rapist. When Kludjian later saw Paleologus’s name connected to Johnson’s murder case, she said it felt unbelievable that the same man was involved.
In 1991, another woman said a man posing as a Disney employee spiked her drink; she noticed the substance in time and called police, though no charges were filed.
In 1996, a woman he had been dating accused him of breaking into her home and coming at her with a cord. A SWAT team was called after he refused to leave a mobile home in Malibu. He later pleaded guilty to burglary and received probation.
In August 1998, he attempted to rape 24-year-old Heather Maher in Brentwood after luring her with a similar audition scheme.
He pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit rape and was sent to state prison, from which he was released on parole on January 20, 2003, just 26 days before Kristi Johnson disappeared.
Paleologus’s trial for Johnson’s murder began on July 13, 2006. Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney David Walgren led the prosecution.
Because rain had destroyed the physical evidence at the crime scene and Johnson’s car had been wiped clean, the case leaned heavily on testimony from women who described similar encounters with Paleologus.
Walgren later said that without their accounts, prosecutors likely would not have had a case. About 40 witnesses testified over the following weeks, including Murphy, Walker, and DeBuono, who each described their encounters to the jury.
Murphy later said her voice shook on the witness stand and that she thought often of Johnson’s family sitting nearby.
After roughly two weeks of testimony, Paleologus agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty, as part of a deal that also barred him from appealing the conviction.
On the day of his sentencing, September 15, 2006, he submitted an 11-page letter to the judge asking to withdraw his plea, saying he had been pressured into it.
The judge denied the request, noting that a plea cannot be withdrawn simply because a defendant changes his mind. Kristi’s parents, Kirk Johnson and Terry Hall, addressed the court before sentencing.
Hall told the judge that Paleologus had been allowed to let the evil in his life escalate. The judge then sentenced Paleologus to 25 years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole.
Three days after sentencing, Paleologus told Dateline NBC that he had only admitted to killing Johnson to secure the plea deal and that he still did not believe he was responsible for her death. In 2008, he appealed to the California Supreme Court, which denied his request.
In the years that followed, DeBuono grew concerned that Paleologus could eventually be released and began corresponding with him by letter.
In 2016, she visited him in prison and collected a DNA sample, using a soda can he had used and physical contact during the visit. She later learned of a cold case from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, where the remains of a pregnant teenager had been found near an old distillery in 1988.
Detective Chris McMullin had worked the case for years and confirmed that Paleologus had family ties to the area and had been there around the time the woman went missing in 1985.
DNA testing showed Paleologus was not the father of the woman’s unborn child, though investigators did not fully rule him out as a person of interest. In 2021, genetic genealogy testing identified the remains as those of Lisa Todd, though her killer has not been identified.
Paleologus became eligible for parole in 2024. That August, he voluntarily waived his right to a hearing for two years. “This is the kind of offender that will never stop,” DeBuono said of her years-long effort to keep him in prison.
Hall later said she believed victims’ rights had weakened over the years in Los Angeles County. A hearing was scheduled for November 2025; further details about its outcome have not been made public.
Johnson is buried in California, and her family has since set up a memorial scholarship fund in her name at her former high school in Saugatuck, Michigan.
