The Hillside Stranglers
Darcy O’Brien
To
Benedict Kiely,
cher maître,
and
Patrick MacEntee,
senior counsel
Lex non favet delicatorum votis, neque libermeus.
—after a legal maxim
[The law does not favor the wishes of the delicate. Neither does my book.]
CONTENTS
Preface
I “Mi numi!”
II Disloyalties
III A Resurrection of Faith
Epilogue
Sources and Acknowledgments
PREFACE
In the urban America of today, murder has become so common-place that it often goes almost unnoticed. Occasionally, however, even in a society numbed by violence, analysis, and explanation, certain murders gain publicity by virtue of their peculiar horrors. Ordinary citizens recognize for the moment that they and the civilized life their democracy is supposed to protect are under threat. The routines of daily life are interrupted by a mass anxiety. We grow afraid.
Such was the atmosphere of Los Angeles in recent years, when the term “Hillside Strangler” entered the city’s and, given the efficiency of modern communications, even the nation’s vocabulary. Actually there were two Hillside Stranglers, but the singular cropped up first and tended to stick. They were cousins, aged forty-four and twenty-six at the time they began killing women in Los Angeles in 1977. Between October of that year and February 1978, they raped, tortured, and strangled to death ten young women and girls, dumping the bruised and stripped bodies mostly on hillsides northeast of downtown. During Thanksgiving week alone five bodies turned up, the victims ranging in age from twelve to twenty-eight.
That was when the panic set in. These five were linked to at least three other killings. In December another body was found nude and spread-eagled on a hillside facing City Hall, as though the killers were making an obscene and defiant gesture toward the city itself. After the New Year, it appeared that the killers had had their fill. They were at large, but by the end of January the city began to breathe a little easier, and stories about the Hillside murders dwindled in the newspapers and on television. But then in February another body: this an eighteen-year-old girl stuffed into the trunk of her new car, which had been pushed over a cliff high on Angeles Crest. The panic renewed itself. Public anger turned on the police, who despite a task force numbering nearly a hundred officers seemed baffled.
Women, if they had to go out at all at night, hurried from their cars to what they hoped was the safety of their houses. Yet one victim, a student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design, appeared to have been abducted from her own apartment; another had apparently been dragged from her car parked just across the street from her parents’ house. The victims seemed to have been picked at random and from various parts of the sprawling city: Hollywood, Glendale, the San Fernando Valley. No neighborhood felt safe. The killer or killers might strike anywhere. One victim had been waiting for a bus in Hollywood; another had last been seen leaving her Glendale apartment in her car to go to work.
Nor were the victims alike in appearance or occupation. One was black, one Hispanic, the others Caucasians ranging from dark to fair. The first two and the eighth victims had been prostitutes, the others students and working women. The killers appeared indifferent only to the old; otherwise their tastes were catholic.
Then abruptly the killings stopped. Had the Strangler or Stranglers simply had enough, or were they afraid of getting caught? Would they resume their spree, once they thought the heat was off? The police had made a couple of arrests, but these suspects proved innocent of the Hillside murders. The first anniversary of the first killing passed with no important, nerve-flaying questions answered. Not even the actual site of the murders, if there was one site, was known. Psychiatrists offered psychological profiles of the killer or killers, but their opinions were contradictory, linked only by the theme of hatred of women.
In January 1979, the case broke. The younger of the Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi, had moved to far-northern Washington State, where on his own he had strangled to death two more young women, college students. He had left several clues and was arrested immediately by local police. His driver’s license showed a Los Angeles address, and when the local police telephoned the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office for a background check, a primary investigator on the Hillside case happened to take the call. He knew immediately from Bianchi’s L.A. address, which was identical to that of one of the Hillside victims, that at least one of the Stranglers had been caught. From there it was easy to find the other, Angelo Buono, a Glendale auto upholsterer who was Bianchi’s cousin and only close male friend.
But the ordeal for the police and for the city, apparently over, had only just begun. Bianchi, an articulate young man, at first denied everything and then, supposedly under hypnosis, displayed the classic manifestations of a multiple personality. He apparently revealed that an alter ego, whom he called Steve, had committed the murders, of which Kenneth knew nothing. A third personality, called Billy, later emerged, and possibly a fourth and a fifth. Bianchi implicated his cousin Buono, who he said had collaborated with Steve in the Hillside murders; Steve alone had killed the two girls in Washington. Bianchi’s lawyer entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, supported by a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Buono, meanwhile, was under surveillance by Los Angeles police, but he remained free, denying any connection to the Hillside killings. If Bianchi’s insanity defense proved successful, he would hardly make a believable witness against his cousin.
Bianchi’s insanity plea was challenged, however, by two other psychiatrists, and discoveries made by two Los Angeles homicide detectives further weakened his credibility. After several months of conflicting diagnoses in Washington, Bianchi made a deal with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and the Washington authorities. He would plead guilty to the Washington murders and to five of the Hillside murders, and he would come to L.A. to testify against Buono. In return he would get life with the possibility of parole, and he would be permitted to serve his sentence in California, where the prisons were more comfortable than in Washington. Had he not made the deal, he would have faced the death penalty in Washington and possibly in California.
In October 1979, police arrested Angelo Buono in Los Angeles, and he was charged with ten counts of premeditated murder. A ten-month-long preliminary hearing, lasting until March 1981, resulted in an order for Buono to stand trial on all ten counts. Because he was accused of multiple murders, he faced the death penalty.
As soon as Kenneth Bianchi was brought to Los Angeles, he began violating his agreement to testify against his cousin. His testimony became a morass of contradictions. At times he asserted that he knew nothing of the Hillside killings and that he had no idea whether his cousin Buono had been involved or not. Meanwhile a mysterious Los Angeles woman, an actress and playwright named Veronica Compton, who had visited Bianchi in jail, traveled up to Washington and there attempted to strangle to death a woman she had picked up in a bar. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of premeditated attempted murder, and she was sentenced to life. She became known as the Copycat Strangler. Apparently she had acted out of some strange affection for Bianchi, trying to exonerate him from the Washington murders.
With Bianchi continuing to contradict himself, Buono’s trial was scheduled to begin before Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George in September 1981. In July, the District Attorney’s Office suddenly moved to dismiss all ten murder counts against Buono. Bianchi’s contradictions, the deputy D.A. argued in his motion, made prosecution of Buono impossible. Without Bianchi’s cooperation there would not be enough ev
idence to convict Buono.
Judge George adjourned court for a week, but no one doubted that he would grant the prosecution’s motion to dismiss charges, as judges routinely do. When the judge did just the opposite, denying the motion, ordering prosecution, and saying that if the D.A.’s Office could not pursue the case, he would bring in the attorney general or a special prosecutor, the legal community was stunned, and the city rejoiced. Legal opinions differed on the propriety of the judge’s action and the stern language in which he couched it, but the typical citizen, frustrated by years of terror and a seemingly paralyzed system of criminal justice, was delighted and relieved.
The D.A.’s Office withdrew from the case, and two deputy attorneys general were assigned to prosecute. They knew that this would be a long and difficult court battle, lasting perhaps a year, but they did not know how long and how difficult the case of People v. Buono would actually prove to be. Before the jury would finally reach its verdict on Buono, more than two years would pass, making this the longest criminal trial in the history of the United States.
The foregoing has been as brief a summary as I have been able to make of an acutely horrible series of crimes, their effect on a city that prides itself on being a place of easy and good living, and the extraordinarily complex and lengthy process of bringing the Hillside Stranglers to justice. But these are merely the facts, and only the principal facts at that. No summary can convey the personalities, backgrounds, and motives of the Stranglers, nor the sense of being there as they commit their crimes, nor the pervasive effects and implications of their savagery, nor the frustrations, mistakes, and triumphs of the police, nor the controversial role of psychiatric analysis, nor the emotional and intellectual drama of the trial of Angelo Buono. And no summary can evoke and explore and dramatize the disturbing issues raised by the case. For all this, I decided-some years ago, a book was required; and for various reasons, I knew that I should write that book.
In the autumn of 1977 I knew no more about the Hillside Stranglers than any other daily reader of the Los Angeles Times and faithful watcher of the evening news. I was a professor at Pomona College then, teaching English and nervously awaiting publication of my fourth book and first novel, a semiautobiographical account of growing up in L.A. as the son of a once-prominent cowboy star and a Broadway actress who retired before my time. I had lived most of my life in Los Angeles and I loved my hometown, as I still do; but mine had been a rather sheltered existence. My friends were middle-class or rich. From my parents I knew something of the down side of show business; from my sister, who by then was a member of the New York Philharmonic, I knew something of the anxious life of the professional musician. But my only contact with a true cross section of the citizens of Los Angeles came when I visited Dodger Stadium or the Coliseum or, earlier in my life, the boxing matches at the Olympic Auditorium. I knew little of the underside of L.A., nothing of the many who make their way through life by brute force. Everything I knew about violent crime and criminals I had read in books.
As I read that autumn about the Hillside Stranglings in the newspaper, I sensed the city’s growing panic. When I noticed that one of the murdered girls had apparently been abducted from a street only a mile or two from where my eleven-year-old daughter was living with her mother, I worried, but only briefly, because I knew that Molly did not wander around alone in the city. Had I known then what I know now about the methods of the Stranglers in luring their victims, I would have worried more. No girl or woman was safe.
In January 1978, a month before the final Hillside murder, I took a job at the University of Tulsa that offered me most of the year free to write and, equally important as it turned out, to travel as I wished when I was not teaching. In Oklahoma I became aware by chance of the details of an unsolved murder case, and I immersed myself in police files, court documents, and the opinions of those who had been involved, including a colorful private detective who was new to my gallery of human types. I also spent a great deal of time in honky-tonks, picking up dialogue and approaches to life different from my own. Out of this spontaneous fascination evolved a novel, although in writing the story I removed the murder in favor of a suicide and invented characters and motives. At the time I could not know it, but as I look back I see that somehow I was sharpening my skills for a book about the Hillside Stranglers.
Late in 1981, when I learned that my old friend and Princeton roommate Judge Ronald M. George had been assigned the Hillside Stranglers case and had refused to permit the D.A. to drop murder charges against Angelo Buono, my writer’s pulse quickened.
On a visit to Los Angeles I called on the judge and began to ask him about the Stranglers. He cut me off, refusing on ethical grounds to discuss the case while it was in progress. Though surrounded by his family, he looked more solitary than I had ever seen him during the twenty-five years of our friendship. When I said that what little I knew about the Stranglers suggested that they would be a natural subject for a book, he agreed but warned me that I had no idea what I might be getting myself into. He said that there was already enough on the public record to form the basis of a book, one that might have significant social and moral resonances. If I probed beyond and behind the public record, there was no telling what I might discover, but that would be up to me. I did not press him further, but I knew then what I would be doing for the next two or three years.
At first I thought that I would turn the Hillside Stranglers material into fiction, but once I had plunged into the research I saw that the true story had to be told and presented as true. Otherwise no one would believe it; the novelist would be dismissed as having a sick and fantastical imagination. Nor would the social and moral issues stirred by the case have sufficient impact if presented in the guise of an imagined story. Buono’s trial itself, I began to see, was drama ready-made for narrative distillation, although at the time I of course had no idea how dramatic and dicey its final act would turn out to be. I would have to write in a hybrid form, telling the story with the techniques of the novelist but denying myself the privilege of inventing characters and events.
The trial of Angelo Buono was not yet a year old when I began my full-time research. I took an apartment in Los Angeles and quickly became obsessed with the Stranglers. I discovered an L.A. I had never known firsthand, yet my familiarity with the city helped immeasurably as places and people came to life for me—and a morbid life it was. Eighteen places in the city, the locations of the abductions and the body dumpings, will in my mind be associated with death as long as I live. Only the other day, on a visit to Warner Brothers studio, I stopped my car at the place on Forest Lawn Drive where the first body was found and got out to look again. I grew apprehensive staring at the spot, photographs of the corpse mingling in my mind with the actual scene. Compulsively I drove to five of the other body sites, as though on a ghostly pilgrimage.
Countless details and encounters have contributed to this book. My work on it, before the actual writing, consisted equally of reading court documents and talking to people involved with the case. Bianchi’s interviews with psychiatrists alone ran to over five thousand pages, the videotapes of those sessions some fifty hours, his confessions to police over twenty hours and two thousand pages, the transcript of Buono’s trial over fifty thousand pages. I played the tapes of Bianchi’s confessions, of which I managed to obtain copies, over and over in my car as I drove around and at night when I was writing, before I went to sleep, so that I could get to know his sounds intimately and dream about him—a ghastly experience but one that always got me writing the instant I woke up in a cold sweat. But in the end none of the reading and watching and listening and poking around I did helped me as much as meeting one particular policeman. He was Sergeant Bob Grogan of LAPD Homicide, and he has become a friend for life.
I first met Sergeant Grogan in March 1983. It had taken me several weeks to make contact with him. I gathered that he did not much care for writers, who he thought were inclined to admire criminals and to give co
ps a bum rap. So I had stressed my academic credentials, in the hope that he might consider a professor from the University of Tulsa relatively harmless. My message to the sergeant said merely that I wanted to try to understand a homicide detective’s point of view on the law as it applied to murderers. What observations did he have on the Hillside Stranglers case? How strong did he consider the evidence, much of which he had gathered, in this trial that had already run on for over a year and threatened to become the longest criminal trial in the history of the United States? Finally Sergeant Grogan returned my call and agreed to have lunch.
For months I had been examining the transcript, by then nearing thirty thousand pages, and the evidence—thousands of things, photographs of the murdered young women, the love poems of Kenneth Bianchi, an empty wallet—in the trial of Angelo Buono. I worked in a little office on the thirteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown L.A., checking in every morning at nine and leaving at five, as if I were on salary. Just down the hall in Judge George’s courtroom, Angelo Buono sat slumped and contemplative. When something of note was happening in court, I would go in to observe, scrutinizing Buono from various angles and distances, lowering my gaze when I caught his eye. He scared me to death. Even his hands, disproportionately long and sinewy, frightened me.
My subject came to possess me. Each night I found myself jittery and depressed, and my dreams were numerous, but I awoke eager to begin again, like a boozer curing his anxiety with a fresh drink. Mine was a modem sensibility, trained to strive for nuance and irony, conditioned to question absolutes, shaped to be suspicious of words like “good” and “evil.” But the more I studied the Stranglers, their acts, their backgrounds, the theater of their lives, the more my early Roman Catholic beliefs intruded on my skepticism and detachment. I was face to face with evil, and try as I would, I could find neither theory nor language to ameliorate the unredeemable nature of these men. Conrad’s well-worn phrase “The horror! The horror!” came into my mind every day.
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