It would probably be true to say that all serial killers are Right Men.
Chapter Nine
The Hillside Stranglers
The most widely publicised 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 disorganised killer, and if luck is on their side, these are the most difficult 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 like Schaefer or Heirens, both of whom were tormented as they felt themselves being taken over by the urge to kill—so much so that 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 a 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 savour 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 20 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 a deux. Ten years later, came the Hillside Stranglers.
Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi were cousins, Buono (born 1934) being the elder by 17 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 25.
There he was again turned down on two occasions by the LAPD, and decided instead to become a psychiatrist. He began by reading psychology textbooks, but decided to take a short cut to a career in the field: he placed a fake job advertisement in a newspaper, and then took the identity and qualifications of a graduate 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 got 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 soon made a start. At a party he met an attractive blonde, 16-year-old Sabra Hannan, who wanted 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 materialise, 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 practised anal intercourse. They called their agency the Foxy Ladies.
It was a slight 15-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 sodomised her, and threatened her with death. He was so shocked that he put her on a plane back home to Phoenix, 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 a 300-pound bouncer named Tiny to ‘visit’ Buono’s garage. Tiny took with him four equally huge companions. Buono was working in a car when they walked in, and when Tiny asked him if he was Mr Buono, he just ignored him. Tiny 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 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 sodomise 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 17 October 1977, they encountered Yolanda Washington, a 19-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 garrotting 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 15-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, they were ready for more, and 6 November 1977 found them cruising for another victim. They picked up 21-year-old Lissa Kastin, on her way home from her job as a waitress on Hollywood Boulevard. Again they posed as policemen and instead of the station 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 9 November 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 sodomised 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 28; 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, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, 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 neighbourhood. The girls were vulnerable; they had just stolen a hundred-dollars worth of costume jewellery 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 labelled 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 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 28 November 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 phoney police badge and told her that she was under arrest. Even as she protested—and a dog barked loudly in a nearby house, causing a woman to look out of the window—they bundled her into their car and drove her away. When she realised 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 realisation that a neighbour 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 16 February Bianchi arrived at Buono’s house to find an orange Datsun parked outside. Cindy Hudspeth had called to ask Buono to make new mats for her car. The opportunity was too good to miss. She was spread-eagled naked on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the posts, and then raped for two hours. When the cousins were 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 naivety, 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 21 May 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 22-year-old student whom he had known when he worked in as a department store security guard.
On 11 January 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 e
jaculated 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 Sheriffs 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 14 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 getting to Bellingham, and within hours of arriving, he was certain that he had found at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. A large cache of jewellery had been found in Bianchi’s apartment, and two items matched jewellery 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 Angelo Buono, 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.