Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

  Kelli got fed up. She told him that he was a zombie around her. A husband who changed diapers was nice but not enough. He did not seem to care even to take her to a movie. She wanted a man who could enjoy life. She suggested after Christmas that he move out. He begged to stay on. He wept, saying that his son was the most important thing in his life. He would get himself together, he said, urging her just to be patient.

  Kelli’s latest declaration of independence helped convince Kenny to act. He had somehow to prove that he was not a man to be trifled with. Gradually a plan formed in his mind. He would shake up this sleepy, complacent little town. He would bring a little of Los Angeles to Bellingham, a touch of California to Washington State. He would make a comeback.

  With renewed energy, Kenny set his scam in motion. Captain Bianchi would use his position to achieve his secret goal, just as Angelo had used his badge and then his sheltered, secret house. How had Kenny failed to think of this before? Captain Bianchi had all kinds of houses at his disposal, empty vacation places just as safe and secluded or more so than Angelo’s house had ever been. And he would out-Angelo Angelo. He would kill alone. He would make Angelo look like an amateur. Everything about the plan filled Kenny with eager anticipation. He moved swiftly to implement it, quickened by this new sense of purpose.

  On Tuesday, January 9, Bianchi telephoned Karen Mandic, a girl he had met when working at Fred Meyer’s hardware. Her roommate, Diane Wilder, answered, saying that Karen was out; Kenny left a message for Karen to call him. When Karen returned his call, he told her that he had a housesitting job for her if she wanted to make a hundred dollars. A new security system was being installed at the Catlow house on Bayside Drive, and the house would be without an alarm Thursday night. The Catlows would be away. If she would stay in the house, it would help him out. He suggested that Karen bring Diane along to keep her company. And one other thing. It would be better not to say anything about this to anyone other than Karen. The Catlows might not like the idea. She knew how people were. Karen said that she and Diane would meet him at the house at nine Thursday evening.

  On Wednesday evening, Bianchi telephoned the Sheriff’s Reserves office. He could not make the class on first aid Thursday evening, he said. Unfortunately he had to teach a class himself for his company.

  The next twenty-four hours Bianchi spent in a dream. He made several trips over to the Catlow house to check everything out and made sure that their daughter, who was in town, was not going to drop by Thursday evening unexpectedly. He decided that the basement would be the best place for action and left a length of strong cord there. He did not think through the details of his scheme, so as not to spoil it. Improvisation had always played a part in Los Angeles, and not knowing everything that might happen added to his excitement.

  It was cold and wet in Bellingham that night when Karen and Diane arrived at the Catlow house. Kenny was waiting for them outside in his Whatcom Security pickup. He suggested that Karen accompany him inside first to turn on the lights and check things out. They would only be a minute, he told Diane, and he was scarcely longer than that.

  Inside, he urged Karen down the basement stairs—to check on the fuses, he said—and in the basement he grabbed the cord and wrapped it quickly around her throat from behind and strangled her with quick, fierce, and deadly force. She did not even have a chance to cry out. So great was his fury that the rope cut right through her flesh. He would worry about sex later. He hurried up the stairs to get Diane and wasted no time with her either. Once she stepped inside the door, he shoved her down the stairs and strangled her immediately.

  It was done. Kenny was winded. He looked at the clothed bodies and pondered what to do next. He did not feel particularly aroused. More for form than from passion he opened his pants and masturbated over the clothed bodies as a last rite.

  Where to dump them? He remembered a cul-de-sac near a school less than a mile away. He dragged the bodies one by one up the stairs and put them into Karen’s hatchback Mercury. Then he drove the Mercury to the cul-de-sac, left it with the bodies heaped together in it, walked back through the rain to the Catlows’, and drove his pickup home, disposing of the ligature on the way. It occurred to him that Angelo would have been useful during the dumping stage—as with Cindy Hudspeth’s Datsun, Karen Mandic’s car could have been driven to a more remote spot—but that seemed a minor inconvenience. Kristina Weckler and Lauren Wagner had been dumped almost as close to Angelo’s house.

  Climbing into bed, Kenny was careful not to disturb Kelli. He slept well that night, feeling disburdened, secure in the certainty that he had gained the headlines again and that he had done it on his own. He hoped the news would reach Los Angeles.

  FOURTEEN

  The news reached Los Angeles in ways Kenny had not anticipated. He was checking on security the next day at the South Terminal, a waterfront warehouse filled with canned salmon that he enjoyed stealing, when he was arrested on suspicion of double homicide. Karen Mandic had told her boyfriend about the housesitting job, mentioning Kenny’s name, and in Karen’s apartment the police found a note in Diane Wilder’s handwriting saying that Ken Bianchi had telephoned. A search of Kenny’s house turned up masses of obviously stolen goods, so the police booked him for grand theft as well, to make sure that they could hold him, first in the Bellingham City Jail and then at the Whatcom County Jail.

  The Bellingham police, noting Kenny’s California driver’s license, telephoned the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to check on the suspect’s background. They made no connection themselves between Kenny and the Hillside Strangler case, but their call was referred to Frank Salerno, who, once he heard Bianchi’s Los Angeles address, knew what had happened. That telephone call was for Salerno a profane epiphany. In an instant the entire case broke open for him in a dizzying series of connections that had obsessed and eluded him since Halloween of 1977. From that moment Salerno knew that between the Hillside Stranglers and justice there stood only the law.

  On Sunday, January 14, Bob Grogan answered a long-distance call from his partner, Dudley Varney.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Bellingham, Washington. I’m up here with Frank Salerno.”

  “What are you guys doing? Where in hell is Bellingham?”

  Grogan was just unpacking from a trip to Greeley and Pueblo, Colorado. Another false lead to the Stranglers. A San Marino, California, socialite had charged her boyfriend with raping her in the Rocky Mountains. She said that the boyfriend had confided to her that he was the Hillside Strangler. Just another wacko, Grogan had concluded after interviewing the man.

  “You better check on these addresses: 809 East Garfield, Glendale; 1950 Tamarind,” Dudley Varney said.

  “Check on those addresses? Dudley, are you kidding? Check on them? That’s Kimberly Martin and Kristina. What’s going on?”

  Varney told Grogan about the phone call Salerno had gotten from the Bellingham police. Salerno had recognized what he was on to immediately when he traced Bianchi’s driver’s license. Now they were up in Bellingham and everything was breaking open. In Bianchi’s house they had found a big stash of jewelry—rings, pins, watches, loose diamonds—and one of the rings matched the description of a turquoise one Yolanda Washington was supposed to have been wearing. A gold ram’s-horn necklace matched Kimberly Martin’s.

  “What about the other guy?” Grogan wanted to know.

  “There’s a lead on that. Looks good. Bianchi’s wife says his only friend in L.A. was a guy named Angelo Buono. It’s his cousin. Some auto upholsterer on Colorado Street in Glendale.”

  “Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. Jesus Christ, Dudley, do you know what this means? That wacko German detective was right. Two Italians. He said brothers. Cousins is close enough. You said Bianchi has a wife, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Common-law. That’s not all. He’s got a baby. Little boy born right after Cindy Hudspeth.”

  “Excuse me,” Grogan said. “I got to throw up.” />
  “Yeah. I’m kidding Salerno about the Italian connection. Great family people.”

  Grogan immediately telephoned Joe Wagner and Charlie Weckler. The Wagners were moving up to Oregon, and the Wecklers were thinking of moving to Hawaii, hoping a change of scene would blur memories, but Grogan had kept in touch with both. Then Grogan got busy. He arranged for surveillance of Angelo Buono: an undercover officer would stalk him everywhere. Grogan checked Buono’s address on a map. It made sense. 703 East Colorado Street was in the center of a circle formed by the locations of the body sites. Kristina and Lauren had been dumped almost in the same neighborhood as Buono’s. But it was difficult to think of murderers living in Glendale, a peaceful community for Los Angeles, full of retired people and the silence of Forest Lawn. Casey Stengel had owned a house there and had died and was buried there beside his wife, and he seemed other than for his fame the typical Glendale resident, middle-American, down-to-earth, a relic of innocence.

  Grogan telephoned Frank Salerno’s new partner, Deputy Pete Finnigan, and arranged with him to go talk to Buono after Frank and Dudley returned from Bellingham with all their information. Bianchi was denying everything up there, including the two new murders, but Grogan was feeling optimistic for the first time in fourteen months.

  In the next couple of weeks many of the pieces of the case fell together in spite of Bianchi’s persistent denials. When LAPD Chief Gates gave a press conference announcing that a Strangler suspect was now in custody and released a photograph of Bianchi to the media, the undaunted Jan Sims telephoned the police again to offer her account of the Excalibur incident. This time Grogan and Varney interviewed her, and they believed her. David Wood, recognizing Bianchi’s name, told a television reporter friend of his, Wayne Satz of KABC, about his experience with Becky Spears, and Satz talked Wood into flying to Phoenix in the company of a sheriff’s deputy to interview her and Sabra Hannan, who was also living in Phoenix. They brought the girls to Los Angeles, where Salerno interviewed them and learned all the details of Angelo and Kenny’s pimping operation and the names of other people who knew dark and valuable things.

  Much to his relief, Salerno was able to persuade Wayne Satz not to air his videotaped interviews with Sabra and Becky until Angelo Buono was in custody. Grogan wanted to arrest Buono immediately, but Salerno’s boss, Lieutenant Bullington, insisted that they needed more evidence first, ideally a confession from Bianchi. No one doubted that Buono was the other killer, but after all this time and the mistakes that had already been made, they wanted to be sure that they had the goods on Angelo when they took him. When Grogan learned that Bianchi had been interviewed so sloppily by LAPD officers in March 1979, he vowed to handle as much as he could himself from then on.

  Grogan let only one day pass before going to see Angelo. On January 16 he and Pete Finnigan drove over to the Trim Shop, where they found Angelo seated behind his desk in his office. Finnigan, who had been Salerno’s partner off and on since joining the Sheriff’s Department in the early sixties, working his way up through vice and narcotics to homicide, had been assigned to the Strangler case the previous autumn. He had a special feel for the territory, having been born and raised in Glendale.

  He and Grogan made a striking pair, this rare cooperative link between the Sheriff’s and the LAPD, Grogan the looming Cro-Magnon, Finnigan about five nine, a fireplug with dark, curly hair, always a cigar in his mouth, his knobby face impassive, alert but unreadable dark eyes giving away nothing. Grogan as usual wore a light-colored suit, Finnigan a dark tweed jacket unbuttoned over his round belly. Only their Irish names made them alike. Grogan was garrulous and profane; Finnigan preferred to speak only when he had a point to make, and, like his partner Salerno, he rarely cursed.

  It was only a preliminary visit this time, a way of feeling Buono out so they could decide how to go after him later. They found him cocky, not hostile but not giving an inch either. He pretended to want to cooperate. He admitted knowing Bianchi but implied that his cousin was pretty much a mystery to him. During this session they learned nothing except, to their surprise, that Angelo had married once more.

  On January 28, they visited Angelo again. By this time Sabra and Becky had been interviewed, but again this was a preliminary session, so Angelo had to answer only general questions. They talked to him in his house and noted its extreme tidiness. Unaware as yet of the location of the actual murder scene or scenes, they could not apprehend the significance of the place. There was the gold-smoked mirror, the little sign saying “Please Remove Your Clothes,” the brown vinyl chair, and, beyond the wall, the spare bedroom. They knew that they were talking to the murderer but not that they stood within the walls that had harbored his acts.

  Angelo broke things off by saying that he had to go buy rabbit food. With his beak of a nose and his dyed black hair and crooked teeth and slurred, rough speech, he seemed repulsive to Grogan and Finnigan. As they drove away, Grogan said that he could not remember seeing a human being before who so closely resembled a piece of shit. Yet already they had learned of his reputation as a stud.

  “Hard to imagine all those women going after that,” Finnigan said.

  “Must have a big dick,” Grogan said. “We’ll have to check his peeker out.”

  Salerno and Varney returned from Bellingham, and what were now the five principal investigators went over with one another everything they had on the case. They also consulted the Glendale Police Department. Bianchi, Salerno reported, was pretending problems with his memory, but the evidence against him was already conclusive as far as the Bellingham murders were concerned. And fortunately the courts in Washington were not as sentimental as the ones in California. Bianchi would get death unless they could get him to talk about the Hillside murders. Grogan and Finnigan prepared meticulously for their next interview with Angelo. They would lay everything they had on him and try to break him down. It might be that they could play one cousin off against the other.

  One Tuesday, February 6, Grogan and Finnigan arrived at Angelo’s at five in the afternoon, when they knew he would be closing up shop. They wanted no interruptions. Angelo had already figured out that he was being watched. He had popped into a police station one day to complain about it, the irate citizen invoking his civil rights. This time Grogan carried a little tape recorder concealed in the breast pocket of his suit. He switched it on as he approached Angelo’s front door:

  “Okay, it’s two-six-seventy-nine and it’s seventeen hundred hours. Peter Finnigan and Bob Grogan at 703 East Colorado, interviewing Angelo Buono. Maybe he’s in the house.”

  Grogan knocked. No answer. He and Finnigan walked up the driveway toward the Trim Shop.

  “Angelo,” Finnigan called, “where are you hiding? There you are.” Angelo was stitching the seat on a sports car. “How’re you doing?” Music blared from the radio. Top-forty tunes.

  “Hi, Angelo,” Grogan said, affable as could be. “How’re you doing?”

  “Okay,” Angelo grunted.

  “Busy?” Grogan asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Grogan said. “You’re making money, anyhow. I wonder if we could take a little bit of your time and chat with you. I know it’ll be a pain in the neck, but . . . ah . . .”

  “Why not?” Angelo said. “I didn’t have a good day anyway.”

  “We might as well put the finishing touches on it,” Finnigan said, blowing cigar smoke.

  “Gee,” Grogan said, “that’s a good car. Looks like an Austin Healy.”

  Angelo led them into his office, where they sat down, Angelo behind his desk. A buzzer went off on the wall. Angelo explained that that meant his wife was entering the house. That way he knew what was going on even though he couldn’t see anything from his office. Grogan said that he understood that Angelo needed to watch his customers carefully. This guy, Grogan thought, lives like he’s in a war zone. He remembered Becky and Sabra telling about how closely they had been watched. Grogan said that there
were a few more things he and Finnigan wanted to clear up about Angelo’s association with Ken Bianchi. The detectives asked Angelo about the restaurants he frequented, and Angelo named the Red Vest, the Copper Penny, and Henry’s, before it had closed.

  “Okay,” Grogan said. “Did you ever go to the Robin Hood?” The question was important, because Salerno had found a waitress at the Robin Hood Inn who said that she had seen Angelo Buono talking to Cindy Hudspeth there, when Cindy had been a waitress. She had told Cindy not to give Buono the time of day; he looked unkempt and crude.

  “Robin Hood? Where’s the Robin Hood?” Angelo asked.

  “Up here on Glendale Avenue.”