The suspect was already serving time when police say he attacked two women connected to him on March 5.
HONOLULU, Hawaii — A 55-year-old Hawaii inmate accused of killing his girlfriend and stabbing his estranged wife while on furlough now faces five felony charges, in a case that also revives public attention to his earlier convictions and the people left behind after the attacks.
The known facts of the case are grim and direct: one 53-year-old woman was found dead in the apartment she shared with her teenage son, another 53-year-old woman survived a knife attack at her Kapolei home, and John Nihipali Sr. was arrested at the second scene and jailed without bail. But the case also carries a deeper history. Public records cited in local reporting show Nihipali had already spent years in prison on earlier violent convictions, making the March 5 attacks not an isolated allegation but the latest chapter in a long criminal record now certain to shape how prosecutors and the public view the new charges.
Police said the first victim discovered by officers to be alive was Nihipali’s estranged wife. At about 4:15 p.m. Thursday, officers were sent to Kealiʻiahonui Street in Kapolei on a report of a stabbing. There, police said, Nihipali had entered the residence and stabbed the woman in the neck area. A 30-year-old man in the home stepped in, interrupting the attack. The woman then made it out of the house and reached a neighbor, who called 911. When officers arrived, they said, Nihipali was outside armed with a knife, approached a responding officer and refused repeated commands to drop the weapon. Police subdued him with a conducted electrical weapon and took him into custody. The wounded woman was taken to The Queen’s Medical Center at Punchbowl, where police later said she was improving.
The dead woman’s story emerged only afterward. At about 5:30 p.m., officers responding to a medical call on Fern Street in McCully found a 53-year-old woman unresponsive inside her residence. She lived there with her 15-year-old son, police said. Detectives later determined she had suffered multiple stab wounds, including defensive injuries, and reclassified the case as murder. Family members identified her boyfriend as the same man already under arrest in Kapolei. Investigators said he had entered the apartment with her shortly after 10:30 a.m. and was seen leaving alone shortly after 2:45 p.m. Police believe he took her vehicle and drove it to Kapolei, where it was later found. That left one family facing a homicide investigation inside a home shared with a teenager and another family confronting a surviving victim whose own son or adult relative had helped stop the attack.
Nihipali’s past now hangs over both scenes. Police and local reports said he was serving a five-year sentence for second-degree assault and had earlier completed a 20-year term tied to an attempted manslaughter conviction. Public reporting on court records said the earlier case stemmed from the slashing of his wife’s throat in 2004. An older case from Hawaiʻi Island involved third-degree sexual assault. Authorities have not said publicly whether those earlier acts will be introduced later in court, but the history helps explain why the fact of his furlough has drawn such attention. It also shapes the domestic violence context of this case, where the surviving victim was not a stranger but his estranged wife, and the woman who died was another intimate partner police said he was seeing.
The daily path of the case is also unusually stark. Investigators said Nihipali and the McCully victim entered her apartment together shortly after 10:30 a.m. He was later seen leaving alone after 2:45 p.m. Police said he then drove to Kapolei, arriving just before 4 p.m. The difference between those times shows several hours in which, according to the current public account, the dead woman was alone in the apartment before police were called there. It also means officers arrested the suspect in the later assault before they understood they were also handling a homicide tied to him. Lt. Deena Thoemmes said detectives later pieced the two cases together and concluded that the same man had attacked both women in separate towns on the same day.
On March 7, police announced the formal charges: attempted murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, attempted murder in the second degree, burglary in the first degree and escape in the second degree. He was being held without bail. Authorities have not publicly given a motive or released a next court date in the statements available. They also have not publicly named the women in the police updates reviewed. What the charges do show is that prosecutors are treating the two attacks as distinct criminal acts within one larger course of conduct, and that his status outside custody is itself part of the case through the escape allegation.
There is also the plain human damage that sits underneath the legal file. A teenage boy lived in the apartment where the dead woman was found. A family member inside the Kapolei home had to step into a knife attack to help a wounded woman escape. Neighbors became emergency witnesses. Officers arriving on what might have seemed like a single-household call instead found a suspect, a weapon and, not long after, signs of another household broken by the same day’s violence. The public record remains incomplete, but even in its current form it shows how the case spread through families, not just through charge counts.
Currently, Nihipali remains jailed without bail. The next clear marker is expected in court, where hearings and filed documents should show how prosecutors intend to present both the new allegations and the record that now shadows them.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.