Porn Machete Murder

Police settled in and tried to reason with him, tossing him bottled water several times during the day. For nearly eight hours, he held the LAPD SWAT team at bay.

With dusk approaching and crisis negotiators making no progress with Hill, the SWAT unit decided to wrap things up by using what the LAPD would later describe as a "less-than-lethal weapon."

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

Stephen Hill

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More About

• Stephen Hill
• David Hill
• Herbert Wong
• Eric Jover
• Pornography

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As police moved in to employ tasers and bean-bag projectiles, Hill turned his back to them and seated himself on the cliff's edge, still holding on to his sword. With conscious effort, he pushed himself off the bluff.

He plunged 30 feet to a rocky outcropping, where the crash raised a huge dust cloud that slowly rose upward. Hill then cartwheeled another 20 feet in a grotesque free fall, having lost his sword on first impact. He came to a stop in another cartoonishly expanding billow of dust. He was dead.

The attacks and subsequent suicide were big talk in the gossip-loving porn world, but Porn Valley quickly went back to business as usual. There were bigger concerns: falling DVD sales, Internet piracy and a brief industrywide production shutdown after a male performer was found to have contracted HIV.

Director Mike Ramone attempted to capitalize on the crime's brief notoriety by quickly putting out a compilation DVD featuring both Hill and Wong. It had the provocative title Porno Samurai Killer. The cover art showed Hill and Wong wearing masks — a Ronald Reagan one for Hill and fetishistic leather blinders for Wong. Both men looked puffy and doughy. Though not a hit, the DVD did give the two dead men a measure of stardom they never achieved as mopes.

David Hill says of the events, "We found the live coverage on television and the Internet and watched in horror. After many hours we got a call that Stephen was injured but in police custody, and then a final call that he had died.

"We went down to L.A. to arrange a funeral," his father says. "We invited some of his friends in the industry whose names we found on his MySpace page, but none of them showed up."