The Hillside Stranglers
The most widely publicized case of the late 1980s was at the time another of those mysteries that seem to demonstrate that the police are helpless when a killer chooses to strike at random. But then, the Behavioral Science Unit was still new, and had not yet had time to find its feet.
The problem with the “Hillside Strangler”—as he was then known—was that he seemed to be a completely disorganized killer, and if luck is on their side, these are the most difficult kinds of killers to catch. Ressler explains:
The disorganized killer may pick up a steak knife in the victim’s home, plunge it into her chest, and leave it sticking there. Such a disorganized mind does not care about fingerprints or other evidence. If police find a body rather readily, that is a clue that the crime has been done by a disorganized offender. Organized ones transport the bodies from the place that the victims were killed, and then hide the bodies, sometimes quite well. Many of Ted Bundy’s victims were never found. Bob Berdella, a Kansas City, Missouri, killer who, like John Gacy, abducted, tortured, and killed young boys, cut up their bodies into small pieces and fed them to the dogs in his yard; many that were so treated could never be identified.
Ressler then turns to the Hillside Stranglers:
A different dynamic seems to have been at work in the instance of the Hillside Strangler, who was later identified as two men. The victims were found, and the killers later turned out to have been quite organized offenders. Their desire seems to have been an egotistical one—to flaunt the bodies in front of the police rather than to conceal them in an effort to prevent tracing the killers through identification of the victim.
These two killers, whose trial was one of the most costly in American legal history, differ in another significant way from killers such as Schaefer or Heirens, both of whom were tormented as they felt themselves being taken over by the urge to kill—so that so Schaefer sobbed as he told Sondra London about his compulsions, while Heirens wrote “For God’s sake catch me . . .”
Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono felt as little compunction as two Alsatians who team up to kill sheep. They committed rape-murder as a glutton eats: because it gave them pleasure.
The case is also of interest for another reason. The crimes of the Hillside Stranglers came about because two criminal personalities interacted, and produced an explosive combination. Psychologists sometimes refer to it as folie à deux, or “madness for two.” When this happens, it is usually because a dominant character interacts with a weak one, and enjoys the sense of exerting power so much that he looks for ways to savor it more fully. It can be seen, for example, in the case of Leopold and Loeb, the two Chicago college students who in 1924 decided to commit a murder simply to prove to themselves that they were not like other people. Two decades later, it appears in the case of the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, who killed twenty women to gain possession of their property, and who were executed in 1951. In the 1960s, in England, the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (see chapter 16), were a textbook case of folie à deux. Ten years later, came the Hillside Stranglers.
Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi were cousins, Buono (born 1934) being the elder by seventeen years, and they came together when Bianchi moved to Los Angeles from Rochester, New York, in 1976. Buono had spent most of his teens in a reformatory for car theft, but nonetheless had become the successful owner of an auto body shop in Glendale, and gained a reputation as a first-class upholsterer, his clients including Frank Sinatra. Intensely macho, his infidelity and brutality had resulted in four divorces by the time he was in his late thirties.
Kenneth Bianchi, born 1951, was the son of a prostitute, and had been adopted at three months. A bright child, he had a tendency to lie compulsively. Good-looking and a plausible talker, he had no trouble finding girlfriends, but a certain weakness of character undermined his relationships. In personality type he bore many resemblances to Gerard Schaefer, including a hankering for authority that led him to try to become a policeman. When rejected, he took a job as a night security guard. But his propensity to steal led to many job changes. Eventually, with one divorce behind him, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-five.
There he was again turned down on two occasions by the LAPD, and decided instead to become a psychiatrist. He began by reading psychology text-books, but decided to take a short cut to a career in the field: he placed a fake job advertisement in a news-paper, and then took the identity and qualifications of a graduate student who answered it.
The impact of his cousin’s personality on him was profound, and his open admiration led Buono to offer him a home. There Bianchi was impressed by the ease in which his cousin bedded nubile teenagers and persuaded them to perform oral sex. Buono was brutal and coarse, but as a stud, he was awe-inspiring.
Although Buono soon tired of his fantasy-prone and weak-willed cousin and made him find a place of his own, he nevertheless suggested that they should go into the pimping business together. Bianchi quickly made a start. At a party, he met Sabra, an attractive sixteen-year-old blonde who aspired to be a model and convinced her that he could find her jobs. She moved into Buono’s house, and when the jobs failed to materialize, he asked her if she had ever considered prostitution. Her first reaction was indignation, but after being stripped and beaten with a wet towel and made to perform oral sex on both men, she reluctantly submitted. They warned her that if she ever ran away, their Mafia friends would find her and kill her. On one occasion, she and Buono’s teenaged girlfriend, Antoinette, served seven men at the same time, including the local police chief. Soon the cousins had a small stable of girls working for them, with all of whom Buono practiced anal intercourse. They called their agency the Foxy Ladies.
It was a slight fifteen-year-old called Becky who triggered a series of events that led to multiple murder. One evening in August 1977, Buono sent her to the Bel Air apartment of a wealthy lawyer. When he asked the sad waif how she became a prostitute, she told him the story of how two men kept her a prisoner, beat and sodomized her, and threatened her with death. He was so shocked that he put her on a plane back home to Arizona.
Enraged when he learned what had happened, Buono repeatedly telephoned him, threatening him with harm. The lawyer retaliated by calling upon the services of some biker friends, and asked Tiny, a 300-pound bouncer, to “visit” Buono’s garage. Tiny took with him four equally huge companions. They walked in to find Buono working in a car, and when Tiny asked him if he was Mr. Buono, he just ignored him. Tiny then reached through the window, picked Buono up by his shirtfront, dragged him through the window, and calmly asked: “Do I have your attention, Mr. Buono?” He then ordered Buono not to bother his lawyer friend again, and left him sprawling on the garage floor.
For a Right Man such as Buono, this must have seemed the worst thing that had ever happened to him, a shattering assault on his masculinity. His reaction was murderous rage, and the determination to take it out on a woman.
Bianchi happened to be feeling the same. By this time, Sabra had also run away, and her replacement, a girl named Jennifer, had violently resisted when Bianchi tried to sodomize her. And both men were furious with a prostitute named Debbie Noble, who had swindled them by selling them a list of clients that was supposed to be of men who liked woman to come to their homes, but was in fact of men who wanted to visit a prostitute on her own premises. They both felt like murder.
On October 17, 1977, they encountered Yolanda Washington, a nineteen-year-old prostitute who happened to work with Debbie Noble. The cousins picked her up on a corner of Sunset Boulevard and Buono had sex with her in the back of the car. He then flashed her a police badge, and announced that she was under arrest. She began to scream and struggle until he handcuffed her. Then Bianchi raped her in the back seat before garroting her with a rag. Finally, the two men dumped her naked body near the entrance to Forest Lawn Cemetery, in a position where it would easily draw attention.
For Buono and Bianchi, the experience was exhilarating. Surprised at how much they enjoyed raping and killing a woman, they agreed to repeat the experience as soon as possible. They decided the time was right just two weeks later, on Halloween, but this time they wanted to do it at Buono’s place. They wanted the luxury of time. They picked up Judy Ann Miller, a fifteen-year-old hooker, and in Buono’s bedroom they bound and blindfolded her, and then took their turns raping her. Then they pulled a plastic bag down over her head and tied it around her neck. Bianchi sat on her legs as Buono strangled her with a cord. They dumped her body in La Crescenta, a town just north of Glendale, once again in a highly visible position.
Just a week later, the cousins were ready for more mayhem, and November 6, 1977, found them cruising for another victim. Lissa Kastin was the unfortunate target. They picked up the twenty-one-year-old waitress on her way home from her job on Hollywood Boulevard. Again they posed as policemen and instead of the station they drove her back to Buono’s place. Neither of them found her sexually desirable, so they made no attempt to rape her, but instead violated her with a root beer bottle. They took nearly an hour to kill her, repeatedly tightening a cord around her neck until she was almost dead, and then releasing it. They left her naked body near the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale.
Three days later, on November 9, they were out “hunting” again. Bianchi spotted an attractive young woman waiting alone at a bus stop and struck up a conversation with her; she told him she was a Scientology student, and Bianchi feigned interest, asking her to tell him all about it. In the midst of the conversation, Buono drove up, pretended he hadn’t seen Bianchi for months, and offered him a lift home. Jane King made the mistake of agreeing to let them drive her home, too. Back in Buono’s house, they were delighted to find that her pubis was shaven. She resisted Buono’s rape, and struggled so hard as Bianchi tried to penetrate her anally that they decided she needed a “lesson.” She was hog-tied, and a plastic bag placed over her head while Bianchi sodomized her; by the time Bianchi climaxed she was dead. They dumped her body near an exit ramp of the Golden State Freeway. They were surprised to read later in the newspaper that Jane was twenty-eight; she looked younger.
Her shaven pubis had excited them both; it conjured images of raping a virgin. Only four days after killing Jane, they observed two schoolgirls, Dolores Cepeda, twelve, and Sonja Johnson, fourteen, boarding a bus at Eagle Rock Plaza. Now, the idea of raping two girls at once struck their fancy. They followed the bus, and when the girls disembarked near their homes, beckoned them over to the car. Bianchi identified himself as a policeman and informed them that a dangerous burglar was loose in the neighborhood. The girls were vulnerable; they had just stolen a hundred-dollars worth of costume jewelry from a department store, and were not disposed to argue with the law.
As with their other victims, there was no ride to the station, but only the drive to Buono’s house. There they were both brutally violated. Sonja was murdered in the bedroom. When they came to get Dolores, the terrified girl asked: “Where’s Sonja?” Buono calmly told her: “You’ll be seeing her soon.” The girls’ corpses were dumped on a rubbish tip that Buono knew from his courting days. The police had reasoned, correctly, that whoever had dumped the bodies must have known the area intimately.
As they followed in such quick succession, the crimes began to receive extensive publicity. Because the bodies were usually dumped on slopes, the local press labeled the killer the “Hillside Strangler.” Newspapers around the world soon took up the soubriquet, which had the same touch of brutality as “Jack the Ripper” or the “Boston Strangler.”
The next victim was Kristina Weckler, a young woman who had spurned Bianchi’s advances when they both lived in an apartment building on East Garfield Avenue in Glendale. Kristina stilled lived there and was a student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design. They knocked on her door, and Bianchi casually said, “Hi, remember me?” He told her that he was now a member of the police reserve, and that someone had crashed into Kristina’s VW, parked outside the building. She went downstairs with them to check out the damage, but was instead wrestled into Buono’s car and driven to his house. After raping her, they decided to try a new method of murder: injecting her with a cleaning fluid. It produced convulsions, but not death. At Buono’s suggestion, they placed a bag over her head and piped coal gas into it, strangling her at the same time.
The Thanksgiving killing spree was almost over. On Monday, November 28, 1977, they saw a redheaded young woman climbing into her car, and followed it. And when Lauren Wagner pulled up in front of her parents’ home, Bianchi again flashed his phony police badge and told her that she was under arrest. Even as she protested—and a dog barked loudly in a nearby house, prompting a woman to look out of the window—they bundled her into their car and drove her away. When she realized that their purpose was rape, she pretended to be cooperative, mentioning that she had spent the evening in bed with her boyfriend and was ready for more. While being raped she behaved as if she enjoyed it. Her desperate act didn’t save her life; the brutal cousins strangled her anyway, after an unsuccessful attempt to electrocute her had only produced burns on her palms.
The realization that a neighbor had witnessed the abduction made them decide to use more caution. Nevertheless, three weeks later, both men were dreaming of another rape. Kimberly Martin, a call girl, was summoned to Bianchi’s apartment, and taken back to Buono’s house. After raping her, they agreed that she was no good in bed. Her body was dumped in a vacant lot.
The final Hillside Strangler killing was almost an accident. On February 16, Bianchi arrived at Buono’s house to find an orange Datsun parked outside. Cindy Hudspeth had called to hire Buono to make new mats for her car. The opportunity was just too good to miss. She was spread-eagled naked on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the posts, and then raped repeatedly for two hours. When the cousins were finally done with her, they strangled her. The Datsun was pushed off a cliff with her body in the trunk.
Bianchi had been twice questioned by the police in routine enquiries—but he was one of thousands. Buono was nonetheless becoming nervous and irritable. He was getting sick of his cousin’s lack of maturity, his naïveté, and his carelessness. So when Bianchi told him that his pregnant girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, had left him and moved back to Bellingham, Washington, Buono strongly advised him to join her. At first Bianchi was unwilling—his admiration of his cousin amounted almost to worship—but as always, Buono’s will prevailed.
On May 21, 1978, Bianchi drove to Bellingham and rejoined Kelli and their newborn son. He obtained a job as a security guard, and was soon promoted to supervisor. But the small town bored him. He longed to prove to his cousin that he had the makings of a master criminal. And in the first week of January 1979, his craving for rape and murder became an intolerable itch. His mind went back to Karen Mandic, an attractive twenty-two-year-old student whom he had known when he worked as a department store security guard.
On January 11, 1979, Bianchi telephoned Karen and offered her a house-sitting job in the Bayside area. He swore her to silence “for security reasons,” but Karen nonetheless told her boyfriend where she was going. She also telephoned a friend who was a security guard at the university and told him about the job. Her friend was suspicious about the size of the remuneration, $100 for an evening, but he knew that the Bayside area contained many wealthy homes, full of valuables. If this was one of them, it could be worth it.
At seven o’clock that evening, Karen and her friend Diane Wilder drove to the Bayside house. Bianchi was already waiting for them in his security truck. Karen parked her car in the driveway, outside the front door, and Bianchi asked her to accompany him inside to turn on the lights, while Diane waited in the Mercury. When he reappeared a few minutes later, Diane had no suspicion that her friend was now lying dead in the basement. Like Karen, Diane walked down the stairs with Bianchi behind her, and the ligature was dropped over her head and pulled tight.
For some reason, Bianchi did not rape the girls, merely ejaculated on their underwear. He carried both bodies out to Karen’s car, and lifted them into the back. He drove to a cul-de-sac, carefully wiped the car clean of fingerprints, and walked back to the Bayside house where his own truck was parked, disposing of the ligature on the way.
The Mercury was soon found, and Bianchi was interviewed by the police. He said that he had never heard of the two young women, and had certainly not offered them a house-sitting job. But a search of his home revealed all kinds of expensive items that he had stolen as a security guard.
The baffling thing about the crime was that it seemed so oddly pointless. If it was a sex crime, why were the victims not raped?
Still, the case against Bianchi looked conclusive, even though he continued to insist—with the greatest apparent sincerity—that he had no memory of the murders. His bail was posted at $150,000. And now that he was safely in jail, the police began checking on his background. Since he had been living in Glendale, north of downtown Los Angeles, an investigating detective rang the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to see if they knew anything about Bianchi. Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno of the Homicide Division took the call. When Salerno heard that a former Glendale resident named Kenneth Bianchi had been booked on suspicion of a double sex murder, anticipation gripped him. For the past fourteen months, Salerno had been hunting for the Hillside Strangler, whose last murder had taken place shortly before Bianchi left Los Angeles for Bellingham in the previous May.
Salerno lost no time in heading north, and within hours of arriving, he was certain that he had found at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. A large cache of jewelry had been found in Bianchi’s apartment, and two items matched jewelry taken from the Hillside victims.
Bianchi, continuing to behave like an innocent man, was highly cooperative. He told the police that his only close friend in Los Angeles was his cousin, an automobile upholsterer who owned a house in Glendale. A check on Buono—by an undercover agent—made it seem highly likely that he was the other Strangler. He had bushy hair, as did one of the men seen by the woman who had observed them abducting Lauren Wagner.
Interviewed by the police, Buono’s attitude had an undertone of mockery; he seemed to be enjoying the thought that the police had no real evidence against him. All that, Salerno reflected with satisfaction, would change when his cousin returned to Los Angeles.
Yet, with bewildering suddenness, the whole case threatened to collapse. Kenneth Bianchi had managed to have himself declared legally insane, or, the next best thing: he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. In layman’s parlance, MPD is a mental condition in which two or more personalities appear to inhabit one body. In Bianchi’s case, he was diagnosed a Jekyll and Hyde character whose Jekyll was totally unaware of the existence of an evil alter ego.
Ever since his arrest, Bianchi had been insisting that he remembered absolutely nothing of the evening on which he killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. The police, understandably, thought that was a feeble and not very inventive attempt to wriggle out of responsibility. But Bianchi’s lawyer, Dean Brett, was impressed by his apparent sincerity, his protestations of horror at the thought of killing two women, and his hints that he was contemplating suicide. He called in a psychiatric social worker, John Johnston, who was equally impressed by Bianchi’s charm, gentleness, and intelligence. If his protestations of amnesia were genuine, then there was only one possible conclusion: he was a victim of MPD.
Although the medical world had been debating the existence of this rare illness since the nineteenth century, the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve, based on the book by psychiatrists C. H. Thigpen and H. M. Cleckley, brought the riddle of multiple personality disorder to the general public. MPD therapists posit that the disorder is caused by severe psychological traumas in childhood, experiences so horrific (such as sexual abuse or extreme cruelty) that the personality literally blots them out and hides them away in some remote corner of the mind. In later life, a violent shock can reactivate the trauma, and the everyday self blanks out, and a new personality takes over—for hours or sometimes days or months.
Whether Bianchi knew about this rare psychological illness at this stage is a matter for debate—the police were certainly unaware that he was an avid student of psychology, who hoped one day to become a professional psychoanalyst. What is clear is that Johnston’s suggestion was seized upon with enthusiasm. Equally significant for Bianchi was a showing of the made-for-television film Sybil—another study of multiple personality—on the prison TV. From this, he learned that “multiples” often suffer from blinding headaches and weird dreams. He also learned that psychiatrists try to gain access to the “other self” through hypnosis.
When Professor John G. Watkins, a psychologist from the University of Montana, suggested hypnosis, Bianchi professed himself eager to cooperate. And within a few minutes of being placed in a trance, he was speaking in a strange, low voice and introducing himself as someone called Steve. “Steve” came over as a highly unpleasant character with a sneering laugh. He professed to Dr. Watkins that he hated “Ken,” and that he had done his best to “fix him.” With a little more prompting, he went on to describe how Ken had walked in one evening when his cousin Angelo was murdering a young woman. At which point, “Steve” admitted that he had taken over Ken’s personality, and made him into his cousin’s willing accomplice.
Frank Salerno and his colleague Pete Finnigan were sitting quietly in a corner of the room, listening to all of this. In his notebook Salerno jotted down a single word: “Bullshit.” But he knew that the investigation was in trouble. If Bianchi could convince a judge that he was a multiple personality, he would escape with a few years in a mental hospital. And since the testimony of a mental patient would be inadmissible in court, Angelo Buono would be beyond the reach of the law.
Back in Los Angeles, the investigation was looking slightly more promising. The boyfriend of Judy Miller—the second victim of the Stranglers—had identified a photograph of Angelo Buono as the “John” who had enticed Judy into his car on the evening she disappeared. And Beulah Stofer, the woman who had seen Lauren Wagner pushed into a car by two men, identified them from photographs as Buono and Bianchi. That would certainly bolster the case against Buono. But without Bianchi’s testimony, it would still be weak.
The picture of Buono that had been built up through various interviews made it clear that he was brutal, violent, and dangerous. He had hated his mother, and always referred to her as “that cunt”; later in life, it became his general term for all women. From the time he left school he had been in trouble with the police, and had spent his seventeenth birthday in a reform school. His hero was Caryl Chessman, the “Red Light Bandit,” who liked to hold up women at gunpoint and force them to perform oral sex. At the age of twenty, Buono had married a seventeen-year-old girl who was pregnant, but left her within weeks.
After a short jail sentence for theft, he had married again, and quickly fathered four sons. But he was always coarse and violent: one day when his wife declined to have sex, he threw her down and sodomized her in front of the children. She left him and filed for divorce. So did his third wife. The fourth one left him without bothering about divorce. After that, Angelo lived alone in his house at 703 Colorado Street, Glendale. A friend who had once shared an apartment with him described him as being obsessed by young girls. The friend had entered the room one day and found Angelo peering down at a girls’ playground through a pair of binoculars and playing with himself. Angelo had boasted that he had “seduced” his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. And one of Angelo’s sons had confided that his father had raped him, too. Clearly, Angelo Buono was a man who spent his days thinking and dreaming about sex.
Back in the Whatcomb County Jail in Washington, Ken’s sinister alter ego “Steve” was also telling stories of Buono’s insatiable sexual appetite, and of his habit of killing girls after he had raped and sodomized them. These stories tended to contain certain anomalies—almost as if “Steve” wished to minimize his own part in the murders and throw most of the blame on Angelo—and the same applied to his later confessions to the police; but the general picture that emerged was clear enough. The first victim was the prostitute Yolanda Washington, who had been killed for revenge but raped by both men; they found the experience so satisfying that they began committing rape and murder about once every ten days.
The news that Kenneth Bianchi had accused his cousin of being his accomplice made Buono unpopular in the Glendale neighborhood, and he received several threatening letters. But it began to look increasingly likely that neither Bianchi nor Buono would ever appear in a Los Angeles courtroom. In the Whatcomb County Jail, Bianchi had not only convinced Professor Watkins that he was a multiple personality, but had also aroused equal interest and enthusiasm in another expert: Dr. Ralph B. Allison, author of a remarkable work on multiple personality, Minds in Many Pieces. Allison’s obvious sympathy made “Steve” even more confiding, and led him to make what would later prove to be a crucial mistake. At Allison’s request he revealed his last name: Walker—although at the time, this interesting and important fragment of information went unnoticed. And in the May issue of Time magazine, America learned that Bianchi had been pronounced a multiple personality by two of America’s most eminent psychiatrists. Ken was innocent; it was “Steve” who had killed a dozen or so young women.
At this point, the prosecution decided it was time to bring in their own expert. Dr. Martin T. Orne, of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, who was known as an authority on hypnosis. The sessions with “Steve” had been videotaped, and Orne was given the recordings. They failed, however, to answer the question that troubled him most: Was Bianchi truly hypnotized or only pretending to be?
Dr. Orne noticed that the character of “Steve” seemed to develop during the course of the sessions. “Steve” was always coarse and foul-mouthed—his favorite term for the psychiatrists was “motherfuckers”—but he seemed to slip deeper into his role as the sessions progressed. To him, that suggested an actor rather than a true alter ego.
When the professor came to interview him, Bianchi was his usual cooperative self. Under hypnotic suggestion, he quickly slipped into a trance. Orne now decided to try a decisive experiment. Susceptible hypnotic subjects can be made to hallucinate the presence of another person; therefore, Orne told Bianchi that his defense lawyer, Dean Brett, was sitting in an empty chair. Bianchi immediately did something that Orne had never seen before in a similar situation: he leapt to his feet and shook the hand of the imaginary lawyer. At that moment, Orne was certain that Bianchi was only feigning a hypnotic state. Genuinely hypnotized subjects are content to merely talk to their hallucinations; they never try to touch them.
Dr. Orne then tried another interesting experiment. In the course of conversation, he casually dropped the information that most multiple personalities have more than one alter ego. Predictably, at the next session, Bianchi produced another “alter,” a frightened child named Billy. Asked if he knew “Steve,” “Billy” whispered miserably: “He’s a bad egg.” Now Orne knew beyond all doubt that Bianchi was faking his disorder.
But it was Frank Salerno and his partner Pete Finnigan who made the discovery that finally exploded Bianchi’s claim to be a multiple personality. Listening to the Allison tape, they heard “Steve” declare that his last name was Walker. Suddenly, both men recalled that they had seen the name Steve Walker somewhere in Bianchi’s papers. A careful search revealed a letter to the registrar at California State University signed “Thomas Steven Walker”—in Bianchi’s handwriting—which requested a diploma without the name filled in. A little sleuthing revealed that the real Steve Walker was a graduate in psychology from California State University at Northridge, and he had answered an advertisement for a job by sending some of his academic papers. Bianchi had actually placed the advertisement, and then used Walker’s name—and his papers—to obtain a phony degree in psychology.
Plainly, Bianchi was shamming and should stand trial. (Dr. Allison was later to admit that he was mistaken about Bianchi; he had meanwhile become a prison psychiatrist, and professed himself shocked to discover that criminals were habitual liars.) Dr. Martin Orne and his colleague Dr. Saul Faerstein—who had also interviewed Bianchi, at the request of the prosecution—were insistent that Bianchi was a malingerer, and it was their opinion that carried the day at the sanity hearing on October 19, 1979. At that hearing, Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Bellingham murders and to five murders in Los Angeles, sobbing and professing deep remorse. Under Washington State law, the judge then sentenced him to life imprisonment without the formality of a trial.
But there were still five more murder charges to answer in Los Angeles. When the Los Angeles County DA’s office offered Bianchi a deal—plead guilty and testify against his cousin, and he would get life with the possibility of parole—he quickly accepted. In interviews with Frank Salerno and Pete Finnigan, he described all of the murders with a precision of detail that left no doubt that it was Ken, not “Steve,” who had committed them.
On October 22, 1979, Angelo Buono was finally arrested and charged with the Hillside stranglings. He was placed in the county jail, where Bianchi occupied another cell. But Bianchi was already reneging on his plea-bargaining agreement, explaining that he had made it only to save his life, and that he was genuinely innocent. The reason for his change of heart was simple. The DA’s office had made the incredible decision to drop the other five Los Angeles murder charges, for which Bianchi could have been sentenced to death. He now had nothing to lose by refusing to be cooperative.
As far as Frank Salerno and Detective Bob Grogan were concerned, it did not make a great deal of difference. The jewelry found in Bianchi’s house linked him to several of the victims, while a wisp of fluff on the eyelid of Judy Miller was demonstrated by forensic scientists to be identical to a foamy polyester material found in Buono’s house. Strand by strand, the case against the Hillside stranglers was becoming powerful enough to virtually ensure Buono’s conviction.
For Bianchi, the case was by no means over. One of the characteristics of the psychopath is that he just never gives up. In June 1980, Bianchi glimpsed an incredible chance of proving his innocence. He received a letter signed “Veronica Lynn Compton, pen name Ver Lyn,” asking for his cooperation on The Mutilated Cutter, a play she was writing. The plot, she explained, was about a female mass murderer who injects male semen into the vaginas of her victims, thus making the police think that the killer is a male.
Bianchi was interested. He became even more interested when Veronica Compton came to visit him, and he realized that this glamorous brunette was obsessed with him. They fantasized about how nice it would be to go on a killing spree together, and Virginia suggested that they should cut off the sex organs of the victims and keep them in embalming fluid.
Soon after that they were exchanging love letters. Finally, Bianchi confided to her his brilliant scheme for getting out of jail. All she had to do was to go to Bellingham, and transform her play into reality: strangle a woman and inject semen into her vagina through a syringe. And Bianchi would then be able to point out that the Bellingham murderer was obviously still at large, and that he must therefore be innocent. But where would she get the semen? Simple, said Bianchi, he would provide it. And he did so by masturbating into the finger of a rubber glove, which he then smuggled to her in the spine of a book.
Veronica flew to Bellingham, and registered at a motel called the Shangri-la. In a nearby bar she made the acquaintance of a young woman named Kim Breed, and had several drinks with her. When she asked Breed to drive her back to her motel, her new friend agreed. At the Shangri-la, Veronica invited her into her room for a drink. Once inside, she excused herself to go to the bathroom, armed herself with a piece of cord, then tiptoed out and sneaked up behind her unsuspecting victim, who was seated on the bed. Fortunately, Kim Breed was something of an athlete. She struggled frantically, and succeeded in throwing Veronica over her head and onto the floor. Then she fled.
When she returned to the motel with a male friend, Veronica had also fled. But the police had no difficulty in tracing her through her airline reservation. She was arrested and, in due course, the “copycat slayer,” as the newspapers labeled her, was sentenced to life. As soon as he learned of her failure, Bianchi lost interest in her, thereby fueling deep resentment.
The case of Angelo Buono was due to come to court in September 1981. But pretrial hearings, before Judge Ronald M. George, began long before that. The first matter on which Judge George had to make up his mind was a motion by the defense to allow bail to the accused. George turned it down. The next motion was to sever the ten murder charges from the non-murder charges such as pimping, rape, and sodomy; this would ensure that the jury should know as little as possible about Buono’s background. Because it might provide grounds for an appeal, the judge decided to grant this motion.
The next development staggered everybody, including the judge. In July, Assistant District Attorney Roger Kelly proposed that all ten murder counts against Buono should be dropped. The reason, he explained, was that Bianchi’s testimony was so dubious and self-contradictory that it was virtually useless. Buono should be tried at a later date on the non-murder charges, and meanwhile be allowed free on a $50,000 bail.
Grogan and Salerno could hardly believe their ears. It meant that even if Buono was convicted on the other charges, he would serve only about five years in jail.
The judge agreed to deliver his ruling on July 21, 1981. During the week preceding that date, morale among the police was at rock bottom; no one doubted that the judge would agree to drop the charges—after all, if the DA’s office was so unsure of a conviction, they must know what they were talking about.
On the day of the ruling, Buono looked cheerful and his junior counsel, Katherine Mader, was beaming with confidence. But as the judge reviewed the evidence, it became clear that their confidence was misplaced. Whether Bianchi was reliable or not, said the judge, the evidence of various witnesses, and the Judy Miller fiber evidence, made it clear that there was a strong case against Buono. Therefore, concluded Judge George, he was denying the district attorney’s motion. And if, he added, the DA showed any lack of enthusiasm in prosecuting Buono, he would refer the case to the attorney general.
Buono, who had expected to walk free from the courtroom, had to cancel his plans for a celebratory dinner with his lawyers.
At this point the DA’s office decided to withdraw from the case. Thereupon, the attorney general appointed two of his deputies, Roger Boren and Michael Nash, to prosecute Buono.
The trial, which lasted from November 1981 to November 1983, was the longest murder trial in American history. The prosecution called 251 witnesses and introduced more than a thousand exhibits. But although the transcript would eventually occupy hundreds of volumes, the trial itself held few surprises. It took until June 1982 to get to Bianchi’s evidence—he was the two-hundredth witness to testify—and he at first showed himself typically vague and ambiguous. But when the judge dropped a hint that he was violating his original plea-bargaining agreement, and that he would have to serve out his time in Washington’s Walla Walla—a notoriously tough jail—he became altogether less vague. Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the results were damning to his cousin.
The defense team raised many objections, and pursued a tactic of trying to discredit witnesses and evidence. On the submission that testimony obtained under hypnosis should be inadmissible, the judge ruled that Bianchi had been faking both hypnosis and multiple personality. More serious was a motion by the defense to dismiss the whole case because one of the prosecution witnesses—Judy Miller’s boyfriend—had been in a psychiatric hospital. This was also overruled: it was the defense’s fault, the judge said, for failing to spot the material in the files.
Finally, the defense called Veronica Compton, the “copycat slayer,” to try to prove that she and Bianchi had planned to “frame” Angelo Buono. Veronica, still seething with resentment, gave her evidence with histrionic relish. But when she admitted that she had once planned to open a mortuary so she and her lover could have sex with the corpses, it was clear that the jury found it hard to treat her as a reliable witness.
In the final submissions in October 1983, Buono’s defense lawyer Gerald Chaleff argued that Bianchi had committed the murders alone, and that his cousin was an innocent man. The judge had to rebuke him for implying that the whole case against his client was a conspiracy. The jury retired on October 21, 1983, and when they had spent a week in their deliberations, the defense began to feel gloomy and the prosecution correspondingly optimistic. It emerged later that one juror, who was resentful about not being chosen as foreman, had been consistently obstructive. But finally, on Halloween, the jury announced that it had found Angelo Buono guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner. During the following week they also found him guilty of murdering Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Jane King, Lissa Kastin, and Cindy Hudspeth. But—possibly influenced by the fact that Bianchi had already escaped the death penalty—they decided that Buono should not receive a death sentence. On January 4, 1984, the judge ordered that, since he had done everything in his power to sabotage the case against his cousin, Bianchi should be returned to serve his sentence in Washington. He then sentenced Buono to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, regretting that he could not sentence him to death. In his final remarks he told the defendants: “I am sure, Mr. Buono and Mr. Bianchi, that you will both probably only get your thrills reliving over and over again the torturing and murdering of your victims, being incapable, as I believe you to be, of feeling any remorse.”
Asked later whether such acts as Buono and Bianchi had committed did not prove them insane, he commented: “Why should we call someone insane simply because he or she chooses not to conform to our standards of civilized behavior?”
An interesting question remains: If the Behavioral Science Unit had been called in at the time of the rampage of Hillside murders in 1977, would there have been a chance of pinpointing the killers?
The answer is probably yes. The worldwide publicity brought the LAPD a communication from a private detective in Berlin. The name of this detective has not been recorded because Detective Grogan was unable to pronounce it, and instead referred to him as “Dr. Schickelgruber.” One day, he turned up, having flown to Los Angeles from Germany. He spoke no English, so a German-speaking detective was summoned. “Dr. Schickelgruber” than wrote (in German) on a blackboard:
Two Italians
(Brothers)
Aged about thirty-five.
The doctor was politely thanked, and was driven back to the airport. No one, says Darcy O’Brien in his book Two of a Kind, took him seriously.
But clearly, someone should have taken him seriously and asked his reasons.
More important, if a detective from Berlin could have recognized that the Stranglers were Italian and closely related, then presumably so could the Behavioral Science Unit. And if they could have got that far, a number of simple steps could have led them to the killers.
Grogan had recognized from fairly early in the Thanksgiving killing rampage that two men were involved. He reasoned this from the fact that when Kristina Weckler’s body was found on November 20, 1977, in an area between Glendale and Eagle Rock, there were no visible drag marks or disturbances in the foliage, which meant that the body must have been carried by at least two men. The same point became even clearer when the two schoolgirls were found.
On his way to Kristina Weckler’s body, Grogan had already noted that the killers must be familiar with the area. The question: “Why Kristina Weckler?”—a quiet art student living alone in an apartment building—could have led to the conclusion that the killer already knew the building, and a search of former tenants would have revealed Bianchi’s name. If they had been aware that their killers could be Italian, Bianchi and his cousin would have immediately become major suspects.
Unfortunately, no one thought of calling in the Behavioral Science Unit (it would have been technically possible because the two schoolgirls were kidnapped, making it a crime eligible for an FBI investigation), so these speculations must remain wishful thinking.
Angelo Buono was found dead of a heart attack in his cell at Calipatria State Prison in California on September 21, 2002; he was sixty-seven. Bianchi is serving his 118-year sentence at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State. Bianchi had been hoping to serve his time in California, rather than in the notoriously harsh Walla Walla, but his lack of cooperation ruined his chances. Subsequently, Bianchi filed a claim against Whatcomb County seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars for lost wages and emotional distress. He argues that police and prosecutors withheld crucial evidence, leading him to his original guilty plea in 1979. Now minus his thick, curly hair, he declared in an interview in February 2004 that he was withdrawing his guilty plea and insisting on his innocence.