Girardot got his start in journalism as a copy boy at the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Subsequent to the newspaper's closing, he worked for the
Ontario Daily Report, the
San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the
Pasadena Star-News. His 1994 story on the unsolved murder of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the mother of novelist
James Ellroy, resulted in Ellroy's book
My Dark Places. Girardot has won several writing awards, including the Southern California Press Association's award for Investigative Journalism 1995, the Los Angeles Press Club's First Place Award for sportswriting in 1998, and he was a finalist for the 2015 University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism in 2015. Girardot headed a project for the
Los Angeles Newspaper Group titled "Getting Away with Murder." The effort chronicled 11,242 homicides that occurred in
Los Angeles County between 2000 and 2010. Relying on data supplied by the
Los Angeles County Department of Coroner the project found that less than 50 percent of all homicides that occurred countywide were ever solved.
True crime Girardot is the author of
true crime non-fiction books, including
Name Dropper, which was cited by author
Walter Kirn in his book
Blood Will Out. He is co-author with
Burl Barer of
A Taste For Murder,
Betrayal in Blue with Barer and
Ken Eurell and
Burned, the biography of serial arsonist
John Orr.
Burned was co-written with Orr's daughter Lori Orr Kovach. All, except
Name Dropper, are published by Wild Blue Press. In December 2020, Girardot and his wife Sarah Favot began hosting LA 85, an episodic contextual true crime podcast with a focus on the impact of serial killers including the
Night Stalker,
Grim Sleeper and
Southside Slayer on Los Angeles in 1985.
Internet/TV Girardot has appeared on several true crime shows on various cable networks including
Investigation Discovery. He has been a frequent guest on
Crime Time with Allison Hope Weiner on LipTV. He has also appeared on Fox News and
Dateline NBC. His topics of expertise include murder investigation, serial arson, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department,
Richard Ramirez,
Clark Rockefeller John Leonard Orr and 20th Century Los Angeles area true crime.
Radio In 2015, Girardot co-hosted the
Randy Economy Show in Los Angeles on radio station
KRLA. ==Personal life==