Hollywood Dreams

Juliana Redding

Juliana Maureen Redding left her home in Tucson, Ariz., in 2006 at age 19 and moved to southern California to pursue an acting career after landing a small role in a 2005 independent movie, Kathy T, filmed in Atlanta. She landed in the trendy oceanfront city of Santa Monica, and in late 2007 found a quaint apartment in a complex surrounded by a white picket fence on the 1500 block of Centinela Avenue, a block or so off Santa Monica Boulevard and within easy striking distance of Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard hotspots. Despite being in a high-rent area where one can expect to pay in excess of $2,000 per month on an average one-bedroom unit, Juliana's apartment had a high-security door and bars on its windows, like many other dwellings in the area. It was about four miles east of the more glamorous part of Santa Monica nearer the beach, but it seemed a safe enough area. The complex was entirely composed of single-level units, making the bars and security doors seem like a good idea.

Clearly a Hollywood head-turner, the brown-haired beauty attended Santa Monica College while working part time in a tapas bar in nearby Venice Beach. She had also reportedly worked as a waitress at a bar on Sunset Boulevard, where the tips were good, while looking for her big break in films and modeling. In early 2008, Redding got a break when she was featured in a pictorial in Maxim magazine's "Hometown Hotties" feature, but Juliana's dreams of stardom were crushed when someone entered her apartment and killed her in an attack that investigators would eventually conclude occurred on Saturday, March 15, 2008.