Manhunters

  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 he
r 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.