Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

  “No,” Jennifer said. “I won’t do that. No. Stop it.”

  When he persisted, she managed to turn herself over and throw him off onto the floor. He looked at her as though he was going to kill her. But she leaped out of bed and showed her nails to him, indicating that she was ready to fight. Kenny grabbed his clothes and left the room.

  In the living room he told Angelo what had happened and suggested killing Jennifer Snider right then and there. First Becky and Sabra had run off, then the bad trick list, and now this, a bitch who wouldn’t cooperate. It was time to teach everybody a lesson.

  “I been thinking,” Angelo said. “We can’t kill Snider, you dumb shit. She could be traced here easy. Ain’t you got a brain? I thought you was so smart. Listen. Remember that nigger whore was with Noble? We can’t find Noble, but we’ll get her friend. She told me where she works. We’ll use my badge and handcuffs. Pretend we’re arresting her, right? Then we snuff her. Noble’ll get the message.”

  “Let’s go,” Bianchi said. “I’m ready for it. Kill the bitches.”

  “Mi numi,” Angelo said, looking Bianchi in the eye.

  Kenny felt that Angelo approved of him, and it made him feel good. Now he would show Angelo that Kenny Bianchi had guts.

  In the spare bedroom Jennifer Snider lay shaking, terrified that both of them would come in and beat her. But she heard the door open and shut and a car start in the driveway and back out. She let a few minutes pass, then checked to see that they were gone.

  She tried going to sleep, but her anxiety mounted. She was asthmatic, and she began to feel an attack coming on. She took her pills, but the attack became worse, choking her. She could not remember ever having felt such anxiety. She went into the living room and, by the light of the fish tank, telephoned a boyfriend and then her mother. The sound of her mother’s voice calmed her down. She told her mother that she was staying at a friend’s temporarily but was leaving tomorrow. The atmosphere here did not agree with her.

  While Jennifer Snider was talking to her mother, Kenny Bianchi was strangling Yolanda Washington to death in the backseat as Angelo drove north on the Hollywood Freeway. Bianchi had already stripped the girl and raped her on the freeway. Now he was showing Angelo that he was no chicken.

  He tried pulling back on her throat with his forearm first, then used a rag Angelo handed him. She was handcuffed, but she managed to kick Angelo in the head, so he held down her legs, draped over the back of the front seat, with his free hand until Kenny had finished the job.

  When she was limp, Kenny surreptitiously removed a large turquoise ring from her left hand and slipped it into his pocket. He thought it would make a nice present for Kelli.

  Then Angelo drove to a spot on Forest Lawn Drive, below the Oakwood Apartments he had once lived in. They dumped Yolanda Washington’s body beside the road, near a rockpile and the entrance to the graveyard, across the way from a Warner Brothers set depicting a peaceful New England village.

  So it began.

  NINE

  Thanksgiving week, 1977, will be remembered as the time of the greatest horror and panic in the history of Los Angeles. No one, except Frank Salerno and a couple of other officers, had paid attention to similarities between the Judy Miller and Lissa Kastin murders; and as for Yolanda Washington, she had been dead for more than a month and might soon have been written off as just another murdered prostitute. But now, in a mere nine days, five more bodies, all of them nude young women or girls, turned up on hillsides in the Glendale–Highland Park area, and connections among them were obvious to everyone. Buono and Bianchi’s acts, though not their identities, had finally penetrated the consciousness of the city. Not a morning or an evening passed for the citizens without their being confronted in the newspapers and on radio and television with news of the killings and the fear, even the certainty, that the Hillside Strangler, as Buono and Bianchi came quickly and collectively to be called, would strike soon again.

  The term “Hillside Strangler” seemed to spring up spontaneously once police began referring to the “hillside murders,” with no one able to claim sole authorship. Nor did police object to use of the singular, though they were convinced that there had to be more than one strangler: the less the killers thought was known about them the better. As a phrase, “Hillside Strangler” captured and even intensified the spreading terror in Los Angeles and soon drew recognition across the nation. In the city, women became afraid to drive their cars alone at night; parents feared for their daughters; self-defense classes for women multiplied; city parks were deserted; sales of Mace, tear gas, and guns took off. The usual conversational mundanities gave way to “I look over my shoulder and around corners” and “Everyone I talk to is petrified” and “I run into the house when I leave my car” and “I sleep with a hammer under my pillow and carry a steak knife” and “That’s all anybody’s talking about at school.” Women debated what they would do if confronted by the Strangler. Was it better to try to run away, to fight, to scream, or to cooperate so as not to make him angry? Some people thought that the stranglings were a message from God, vengeance on a valueless city. The Times soon ran a feature story carrying the headline:

  THE SOUTHLAND’S NEW NEIGHBOR: FEAR.

  Such headlines and stories proliferated in all the media. They increased, of course, the fear they reported, but they reflected reality. No phrase could better describe the mood of the city then and for months to come than the title of the 1950 Richard Widmark film Panic in the Streets. Hollywood had caught up with Hollywood.

  On Sunday, November 20, Sergeant Bob Grogan had planned an outing on his boat, but for him there was no possibility of deep-sea fishing that day. He mildly cursed when, reading the Sunday paper while his wife was off at mass, he got the call to go immediately to the corner of Ranons Way and Wawona Avenue in the hills that separate Glendale from Eagle Rock; had he known that he was embarking on what would become an obsession that would consume six years of his life, he would have cursed more vigorously.

  Bob Grogan could find any address in Los Angeles as quickly as anyone, and he drove everywhere, even when going for a loaf of bread, as though he were chasing or being chased, a Mario Andretti of the freeways, trying to break the sound barrier in his beige unmarked Plymouth or, off-duty, in his baby-blue Coupe de Ville. But he had some trouble locating this body site, enough to make him think that whoever would dump a body there must know the area very well. It was all twisty little streets among low hills, not the sort of place a killer could get away from quickly unless he knew it as well as his own neighborhood. The dead girl lay on her side under a small tree. Opposite was a vacant lot, but elsewhere modest houses lined the streets. Had it not been a Sunday, the body would have been discovered earlier. Grogan arrived just after noon.

  Approaching the body, Grogan thought immediately of his own teenage daughter and tried to banish the thought. He noticed the ligature marks at the neck, wrists, and ankles. When a coroner’s assistant turned her over, blood trickled from her rectum, and Grogan had no trouble making deductions from that: it was his belief, based on his investigations of scores of rape-murder cases, that the victims were very often sodomized and often so after the murder itself. Necrophilia, Grogan felt sure, was a far more common human activity than generally believed. Because almost anyone would sooner admit to murder than to enjoying sex with dead bodies, it was a difficult crime to prove. Neither the public nor most people who wrote about crime would want to believe it anyway.

  Small bruises showed around her breasts. And then, examining her more closely, Grogan noticed something that made him think at first that he was looking at the body of a drug addict: puncture marks on the inner arms. For a second, he was a little relieved. He would always rather deal with the murder of a drug addict. Addicts died young anyway. But there were only two puncture marks, none of the usual scars and needle tracks of the addict. The rectal bleeding and the absence on the body of any obvious signs of a dissipated, druggy existence suggested to Gr
ogan that she might have been tortured before, during, or after the killing, maybe all three.

  He stepped back and looked about. He noticed no footprints or disturbances of any kind on the ground around her, and the body showed no signs of having been dragged. He concluded that she had been placed where she lay, probably by more than one man, removed from a car that had then sped off. But the driver must have known the neighborhood.

  While Grogan was writing up his preliminary report and speaking to the coroner’s office that afternoon, learning that no drugs had been found in the body, a small boy was making another discovery. At about four o’clock on the other, western side of the Elysian Valley, Armando Guerrero, nine years old, was playing in a trash heap on a shady slope, about fifty feet below the obscure little street called Landa. Armando liked playing there because it was a secret place. Hardly anyone ever drove on Landa Street, although it emptied onto Stadium Way, the route to the eastern side of Dodger Stadium; Landa was dark and damp and a little scary, a great place for a kid to sift through trash for treasures. That afternoon, as the November light began to fail, Armando thought he spotted something unusual in the trash pile along with the old mattresses and bottles and cans.

  Armando saw two department-store mannequins lying head to foot together amid the junk. Great things to take home! He approached one, reached down to tug at its foot—but then he noticed a dark circle around the ankle, with ants feeding in it.

  Armando was frightened. He uttered a prayer to the Blessed Virgin and ran home to tell his brother. When the brother, Alonso, seventeen, touched the mannequins, he telephoned the police, saying that the mannequins were very stiff but that he was afraid they were real. He thought he had seen blood on them.

  At first the policeman also thought they were mannequins, but when he touched them he recognized rigor mortis. These were two little girls, so fragile, helpless, dead, rot working away at their faces. Through the greenish slime on one mouth he saw blood-clotted braces on the teeth. He summoned LAPD Homicide.

  It was Bob Grogan’s partner, Dudley Varney, who examined the bodies. Sergeant Varney estimated at once that the girls had been dead for a week. He noticed the ligature marks, the absence of any clothes or jewelry, the smears of dried blood, the armies of ants. Los Angeles was having a November heat wave, and the stench in Angelo’s “cow patch” was higher than usual. Sergeant Varney retreated around a hump on the slope and threw up.

  Looking up toward Landa Street, Varney speculated that the girls’ bodies had been tossed from there and had rolled down onto the trash heap. One man could have done the job, the girls were so small, but that seemed unlikely.

  Varney asked the boys whether they recognized the girls. They said no, but the older brother said that he had heard that two girls were missing from St. Ignatius School. A poster had been distributed offering a reward for information about them. Varney checked and learned that a priest from St. Ignatius had distributed the poster, offering an unspecified reward for information about them, showing their school pictures and giving descriptions of them. They were Dolores Cepeda, twelve, weighing ninety-six pounds, and Sonja Johnson, fourteen, four feet eleven inches tall, weighing eighty pounds and wearing braces on her teeth. Varney glumly contemplated the contrast between their school pictures, which showed happy smiling faces on the brink of life, and the sight of their stiff, bruised bodies and ravaged faces in the trash heap, images that in spite of his experience of homicides haunted his sleep for months.

  His investigation failed to discover a murder scene. The girls had boarded a bus at the Eagle Rock Plaza. They had disembarked, Varney learned, at a stop on York, not far from their homes. A boy who had been a passenger on the bus said that he had watched the girls through the right-side rearview mirror as the bus boarded new passengers, and he had seen them go up to a car and speak to someone on the passenger side of a car. Under hypnosis the boy recalled the car was a large sedan, either light on top and dark on the bottom or the reverse.

  Varney also learned that the girls’ parents had searched frantically for them in the neighborhood that night and the following day and that the priest from St. Ignatius had turned the school into a search headquarters all that week.

  Varney and Grogan compared notes on the three bodies and were in no doubt that the same killer or killers had been involved, probably two men. Certainly if Dolores and Sonja had approached a car on the passenger side, there had been a passenger. One of the girls was said to have been frightened of strangers but very trustful and admiring of policemen—that might be significant.

  The girl Grogan had examined was identified the following afternoon. She was Kristina Weckler, twenty, an honors student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design, a highly respected school. A friend and fellow student of hers, alarmed at Kristina’s absence from classes on Monday, had gone to her apartment. The two girls had promised each other always to check up on each other, for safety’s sake, and Kristina’s friend persuaded the manager of Kristina’s apartment building, at 809 East Garfield Avenue in Glendale, to let her into the apartment. Kristina had lived there for over a year. Her parents, who lived in Sausalito, had helped her choose it, and it had seemed to them just right for her, an older, U-shaped, tree-shaded building in a peaceful neighborhood. Kristina’s friend had found the apartment empty and Kristina’s old Volkswagen parked in its usual place. She then called the police.

  When Bob Grogan visited the apartment on Garfield that evening, he questioned the manager and all the other residents. No one mentioned, of course, that Kenneth Bianchi had lived in the same building until that past August, in an apartment not fifteen feet from Kristina’s. All Grogan learned was that Kristina was a quiet, studious girl who was often alone at night, working on her drawings, which had put her at the top of her class at the Pasadena Art Center. Her friend told Grogan that Kristina had been disappointed not to have been invited to a party on Saturday, the night of her disappearance. It was to be a pot party and Kristina did not approve of marijuana smoking, her friends knew, so she was left out.

  Inside Kristina’s apartment, Bob Grogan’s rage began to grow. It did not take much to ignite Grogan’s furious indignation, and the sight of Kristina’s apartment made him want to explode. He knew that he would not be able to relieve these feelings until he had found Kristina’s killer and had gotten him sentenced to death, if that was still possible in California. Here was Kristina’s drafting board, paints, inks, brushes, and pens arrayed beside it, a light adjusted above it for long hours of work. There, in the bathroom, were her nightclothes neatly laid out, bath oils and lotions lined up on shelves. The bed was turned down tidily, ready to receive a young woman who obviously cared about keeping her life in harmonious order. On a table he found a paperback book on astrology, predictions for lives in the coming year, 1978, which Kristina would not see. She had been a girl who thought about the future. And next to this Grogan found Kristina’s notebook, a kind of diary, filled with colorful little drawings and paragraphs about herself and the things she cared about, books, friends, favorite artists, family. How glad she was to know that her parents loved her.

  Grogan, alone, waiting for the fingerprint men and police photographers to arrive, sat down at Kristina’s drafting board and read the notebook through. He could feel the girl’s presence and hear her voice. He thought of her alive in this room, planning her days, her future; and he thought of his own daughter, another idealistic, loving, and admirable young woman. With a twinge of fear and conscience, Grogan thought of his daughter walking and waiting alone for buses at night in Los Angeles, these killers and others running loose; he resolved to buy her a car the next day.

  The notebook made Grogan swallow hard. When he had finished reading it, he put it in his pocket. He was required, of course, to turn in all evidence; he knew that he could get himself into deep trouble for doing what he was about to do. Suppressing evidence. But Grogan cared more for justice than for legal niceties. The notebook was too private and painful, and
it would have no bearing on a conviction, except perhaps to sway a jury’s emotions. It said nothing of boyfriends, lovers, potential killers. It was testimony simply to Kristina’s love of her work and her family. Her parents should have it. Grogan felt he already knew them, and he already trusted and admired them. The notebook might help them to survive Kristina’s death. Nothing would help them get over it.

  Bob Grogan, huge and brash, was a man of fierce sentiments and loyalties, and more than most detectives he tended to allow himself to get personally involved in his cases. All homicide detectives did this to an extent, if they were any good; you could not be wholly detached and succeed in this work. But Grogan let himself go more than others, for fear of cracking up, dared. When he told Frank Salerno that a homicide cop had to have some means of getting away from his work, of cleansing his mind of blood and of what the frequency of murder said about human nature, he meant it. Only two kinds of people, Grogan was fond of saying, understood human nature: homicide detectives and whores.

  To escape, Grogan now had his boat, which he took out from Long Beach every weekend he could, and he had his large collection of jazz records and his electric organ. Late at night, his head filled with corpses and the indifference of killers, he would pour himself a shot of Jameson’s, put a Duke Ellington record on the machine, and sit down at his organ to play along with the music. The driving rhythms and romantic melodies made sleep possible. He also played golf regularly at the California Country Club, enjoying the green peace of fairways and chit-chat that had no more violence in it than a solid tee shot.

  At home with his wife, daughter, and son, it had long been an agreement that he would keep the details of his job to himself. Murder was not discussed. This was his wife’s wish, and he was happy to accommodate it, sure that she knew better than he what made for a tranquil domestic scene. Grogan and his wife shared a common background—they had been together since Boston—but in personality they were unalike, she quiet and religious. Around her Grogan not only did not speak of murder but tried, to the extent that he was able, to banish strong words and phrases from his vocabulary. He did not mind splitting his life in two for her sake. On the contrary, he felt it gave him something to believe in. But once he was on the trail of Buono and Bianchi, he began to find the daily switch from war to peace more difficult.