On March 21, Dr. Watkins began interviewing Kenny in a small room at the county jail in the presence of John Johnson, Dean Brett, Salerno, and Finnigan. The detectives were there with the permission of the defense lawyer. A videotape machine recorded the session and all subsequent sessions.
Dr. Watkins began by telling Kenny that John Johnson and Dean Brett “felt that maybe I could be of some help to you. I don’t know if I can or not but maybe if we talk a little bit together, I could be of some help.”
To Salerno and Finnigan, this statement was already a bad sign. Was Dr. Watkins here to make a diagnosis, regardless of the outcome, or was he here, as he said, “to be of some help”?
“I’m just here as a consultant and as a psychologist that may or may not be of some help to you,” Dr. Watkins went on. “I know that you’re in a lot of trouble and . . . it’s not pleasant, I know, but how’ve things gone since you’ve been here?”
It’s not pleasant for twelve dead girls, either, Salerno and Finnigan thought.
Kenny said that it was very hard on him. He had never been in jail before. He was trying “to make do and keep calm and keep my wits as best I can.”
“You worry a lot, though, of course,” Dr. Watkins said.
“Constantly.”
“Do you dream much when you sleep?”
“Sometimes. It varies from time to time. There are some days when I can remember two or three dreams.”
Kenny had the right dreams ready, but for the moment Dr. Watkins passed on to touch on Kenny’s past life:
“John was telling me a little bit about your life . . . I understand it’s been kind of a rough one, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream, your life, all together. I thought maybe you might tell me a little bit more about you. . . .”
Kenny was prepared. He knew that he would have to come across as an abused child and that he somehow had to wriggle out of all the nice things he had said to John Johnson about his mother, so he began:
“If you would have come and talked to me about three, four weeks ago, you could have talked till you were blue in the face, for example, about my mother, trying to discredit her, and I would have fought you tooth and nail, thumb and screw. I mean, I would have disagreed with whatever you had to say bad about her because I’ve always had a respect and a deep love for her. And on what foundation, I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve always felt, all these years. But now . . . seeing that I had problems, some more serious than others, which could develop into serious problems . . . it leaves a question there . . .”
“You mean,” Dr. Watkins encouraged him, “you feel that maybe you’ve kind of forgotten the unpleasant sides of the pictures that might have happened then? . . . You’re beginning—what you’re saying in a sense is that the picture isn’t as rosy as you thought of it . . . it’s a lot less pretty than you thought it was. It’s a possibility, you know.”
“I know. I thought about it. It’s like skeletons in a closet,” Kenny said aptly.
Dr. Watkins praised Kenny’s courage in facing up to his “problems” and his unrosy family life: “You’ve started on the road to becoming a more authentic person.” (Salerno and Finnigan winced at this.) Dr. Watkins wanted to know whether Johnson and Brett had told Kenny anything about him.
“Ah, yes,” Kenny said. “Your credentials preceded you.” Indeed they had. One of Kenny’s many psychology texts, Hand-book of Clinical Psychology, even had a chapter in it written by Dr. Watkins.
Dr. Watkins remarked modestly that it was difficult to live up to one’s credentials. What about hypnosis? Did Kenny know anything about that? What did he think about it?
“Well, I don’t really know much about it,” Kenny lied. “I’ve read a few things about it, but it was very minor, just in a small pamphlet once.”
“And movies,” Dr. Watkins said, “have a lot of scary stuff about [hypnosis] and so on and so forth and television.”
“Oh,” Kenny jumped in, “I don’t pay much attention to what’s on TV. Just a lot of junk, you know. I—the thing I feel bad about is that I’m locked in a little cell and I not only have to contend with myself, I have to contend with—the boob tube, you know.”
“Yeah,” Dr. Watkins agreed.
“It rots your brain,” Kenny said ruefully.
“Yeah.”
“But it consoles me once in a while.”
In truth Kenny had had the chance to study Sybil yet again before meeting Dr. Watkins. The movie had been shown again·on BCTV the evening of March 12, the day after the session with Dr. Lunde. When Dr. Watkins said that now he would explore Kenny’s feelings about hypnosis, Kenny said that it would be a new experience for him and that he was fearful of what might happen, what he might find out about himself.
“It sometimes hurts,” Dr. Watkins said. “It isn’t always pleasant.”
“Life isn’t easy,” Kenny philosophized.
“Huh?”
“As they say, life isn’t easy.”
“No, that’s very true. . . .”
“Well, my curiosity has really been aroused.”
After some brief discussion about how Kenny felt when he learned that he was adopted, about his father’s death and about his dreams—“I imagine that some of the dreams you have are sort of upsetting and frightening,” Dr. Watkins suggested—Dr. Watkins began his hypnotic induction, telling Kenny to take a few deep breaths, to stare at his hand, to feel heavy, “to really go down into the most beautiful and relaxed feeling,” and so on. The induction took about half an hour, and then Dr. Watkins said:
“But I would like to kind of talk to you. And I’ve talked a bit to Ken, but I think that perhaps there might be another part of Ken that I haven’t talked to, another part that maybe feels somewhat differently from the part that I’ve talked to. And I would like to communicate with the other part. . . . Part, would you please come to communicate to me? . . . And when you’re here, lift that left hand off the chair to signal to me that you are here. Would you please come, Part, so I can talk to you. Another Part, it is not just the same as the part of Ken I’ve been talking to. . . . Part, would you come and lift Ken’s left hand to indicate to me that you are here?”
Slowly Kenny raised his left hand.
“All right,” Dr. Watkins soothed. “Part, I would like for you and I to talk together—we don’t even have to—we don’t have to talk to Ken unless you and Ken want to. But I would like for you to talk to me. Will you talk to me by saying ‘I’m here’? Would you communicate with me, Part? Would you talk with me, Part, by saying, ‘I’m here’?
“Yes,” Kenny said, his voice lower than normal.
“Part, are you the same thing as Ken or are you different in any way? Talk a little louder so I can hear you. Huh?”
“I’m not him,” Kenny said.
“You’re not him. Who are you? Do you have a name?”
“I’m not Ken.”
“You’re not Ken. Okay. Who are you? Tell me about yourself.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have a name I can call you by?”
“Steve.”
“Huh?”
“You can call me Steve.”
“I can call you Steve, okay. Steve, just stay where you are, make yourself comfortable in the chair and I’d like to talk to you. You’re not Ken. Tell me about yourself, Steve. What do you do?”
Kenny had had plenty of time to think up the right answer to that question. He sat slumped in the chair with his head bowed and swaying, feigning hypnotic drowsiness, sensing that his moment had come. He knew the evidence against him in Bellingham, and he knew that by this time both he and Angelo were prime suspects in Los Angeles. Finnigan and Salerno, who had been identified to him as Los Angeles detectives, were looking on. He knew that he now had to establish an alter personality at odds with himself, and so he answered straight away:
“I hate him.”
“You what?”
“I hate him.”
“You hate
him. You mean Ken,” Dr. Watkins asked helpfully.
“I hate Ken.”
“You hate Ken. Why do you hate Ken?”
“He tries to be nice,” Kenny said, letting his head roll around.
“He tries to be nice. I see. Well, tell me about, how do you mean—”
“I hate a lot of people.”
“You hate a lot of people.”
“He tried to be friends.”
“He tried to be friends. Who do you hate?”
“I hate my mother.”
Having put in place that foundation stone of analysis, Kenny rushed ahead to construct a conflict between Ken and Steve and to establish that Steve had forced Ken to commit the Hillside Stranglings:
“I fixed [Ken] good when he went to California.”
“How’d you do? How do you mean? What’d you do?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Huh?”
“I can’t tell you. You’d tell Ken.”
“He won’t tell me,” Dr. Watkins said, “so you got to tell me.”
“I was with him one night,” and Kenny paused to laugh, rather sneeringly, rather like a movie-version psychopathic killer. “He walked in on his cousin Angelo.”
“Yeah?”
“And Angelo had a girl over,” Kenny laughed again.
“Yeah.”
“Ken walked in in the middle of Angelo killing this girl.”
“Walked in on the middle of what?”
“Angelo killing this girl. I made him feel like he was a part of it.”
“Now, who’s Angelo?”
“Ah, some turkey he knows. His cousin.”
Not content with supplying, along with his psychological alibi, the link between himself and Angelo, Kenny quickly went on to explain how Steve had supplied Ken with a motive, one neatly consistent with basic psychological theory as derived from Freud:
“I made [Ken] think all these real morbid thoughts.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, like there was nothing wrong with killing ’cause it was like getting back at his mother, and I made sure he didn’t really know what was going on. . . .”
“Did he go kill a number of them?”
“Yeah. He—I made him do it.”
“You made him do it.”
“He thought it was his mother, and he thought it was people he hated.” This was a slip, since Kenny, as Steve, had already said that Ken did not hate anyone and was always trying to be nice, but if Dr. Watkins noticed the slip he said nothing about it.
“Yeah,” Dr. Watkins said. “You fooled him.”
“Oh, yeah, he couldn’t figure out later what he had done and why.” Here Kenny laughed again for effect.
“Did he forget it then that he did it, or not?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t let him remember that. . . . I made him strangle them all.”
Kenny then went on to say that Steve had also made Ken strangle the girls in Bellingham. He made one more slip. In response to Dr. Watkins’s saying that he must like to kill women more than men, Kenny, forgetting for a split second the distinction he had established between the two selves, explained why:
“ ’Cause Ken hates women.” But he caught himself, quickly interjecting: “I mean, I hate women.” Again, if Dr. Watkins noticed the discrepancy, he said nothing about it. For good measure, Kenny had Steve say that he wanted to kill Ken, and he would make Ken die, somehow, echoing the dialogue from the film when Marsha says she wants to kill Sybil.
As he brought the hypnosis session to a close, Dr. Watkins gave Steve, or Part, or Kenny as Steve, or whatever Kenny had wrought, all the credibility Kenny could have wished for:
“Well, Steve,” Dr. Watkins said, “I guess you can go back where you need to go. Just go back and sit down.” Kenny was already sitting down. Had Steve been standing all this time? Can one personality sit while the other stands? Kenny, at any rate, stayed seated. “And I want to talk to Ken. You can stay under hypnosis, but Ken, I want to talk to you. Will you come back? When you’re here, say ‘I’m here.’ ”
“I’m here,” Kenny said.
“Ken, do you know anything about Steve?”
“Steve,” Kenny said, drawing out the vowel, knitting his brow.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Who’s Steve? . . .”
Dr. Watkins told Kenny that “during the coming weeks” he would come to know more about Steve and in so doing become “stronger and stronger and stronger with each passing day,” while Steve would become “weaker and weaker and weaker.” He, Ken, would find out more and more “through thoughts, memories, dreams, and so forth” until he fully understood “what has happened.” He would have more energy: “. . . more of the energy of your whole body is going to flow into Ken, give him strength and courage and memory, until pretty soon, there is just Ken. Do you understand that?”
“Okay.”
Dr. Watkins counted to five, telling Kenny that he would be wide awake and alert. “Open your eyes.”
“Hi,” Kenny said, shaking his head. “God, what happened? I feel in a daze.”
Dr. Watkins told him that he would come to understand in his own way, through his own strength, that it would be up to him to discover himself.
“Okay. Real good,” Kenny said. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
Watching all this, Frank Salerno wrote down in his note-book a succinct judgment: “Bullshit.” That evening he and Pete Finnigan went to dinner with some members of the Bellingham P.D. at the Bellingham Yacht Club. Over many drinks they discussed what had happened, how Dr. Watkins had appeared to swallow the whole act, how Bianchi had slipped up a couple of times, forgetting whether Ken or Steve was supposed to be the good guy. When they telephoned Grogan to tell him what was going on, Grogan said:
“Okay, I got a great idea. The judge says to Bianchi, ‘Mr. Bianchi, I tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to let Ken off. Ken is acquitted. But Steve gets the chair.’ ”
SIXTEEN
The detectives, sickened as they were by the prospects of having an insanity plea by Bianchi, could take some solace in his having finally fingered Angelo Buono. In anticipation of this break, Salerno had already contacted Markust Camden, tracing the itinerant bounty hunter all the way to Indiana a week after Bianchi’s arrest. Salerno had several telephone conversations with Camden, who complained of problems with a wife or girlfriend; Salerno, commiserating with him, got Camden to agree to come to Los Angeles at some future date for another interview. Informed about Bianchi’s arrest, Camden said that he recalled Judy Miller’s introducing him to a “Kenny” at the hot dog stand in Hollywood, a guy who she had said was “strange” and “liked sex a lot.” This turned out to be a false lead, but on April 11, during a break in the Bellingham psychiatric evaluations, Salerno got Camden a plane ticket to Los Angeles and flew down to interview him at the Gala Inn motel on Figueroa Street downtown.
Salerno arrived prepared with two mug runs—each a lineup of six photographs of male faces arranged in two rows of three—one run including a picture of Bianchi, the other one of Buono. Camden failed to respond to the run that included Bianchi, but when shown the other, he pointed immediately to the middle picture on the top row. “That’s your man,” Camden said. It was Angelo. Then Salerno showed Camden a blowup of the photograph of Angelo. How sure was he that this man was the one Camden had described earlier as a Puerto Rican who had driven Judy Miller away from the railroad diner in a limousine?
“I’m positive,” Camden said. He added that he would be willing to affirm the identification under oath in court. Salerno put Camden on the plane back to Indiana, asking him to keep in touch if he moved again. He would definitely be needed at the trial.
All this was promising except for one unfortunate factor. Camden had been staying at the Richmond State Hospital in Indiana, a mental hospital. He had checked himself in, he said, voluntarily because he had become upset about troubles with his wife. To Salerno, Camden�
��s stay in the mental hospital did not compromise his credibility—his story was the same as it had been before, and he had picked out Buono’s picture with no hesitation whatsoever—but a defense lawyer might make something of it. Nothing about this case was simple.
At about the same time, Bob Grogan called again on Beulah Stofer—his seventy-fifth visit to her, Grogan estimated. He too had mug runs, but as soon as he suggested to Mrs. Stofer that she try to pick out one or both of the men whom she had seen abducting Lauren Wagner, she started wheezing and asked Grogan to leave. Grogan immediately withdrew, but in the next few days called her repeatedly, trying to calm her and telling her that she was in no danger but that what she knew was vital to the conviction of Lauren’s killer. Grogan tried everything with her, but she was too frightened to cooperate, and she said she was worried that her asthma was getting worse. But finally she agreed to try to help. It had been her doctor, she said, who had convinced her. She had confessed to him what was on her mind, preying on her, and the doctor had advised her to go ahead and try to help the police. Holding back was making her condition worse, the doctor said. Her health required her opening up.
Again Grogan sat with her, soothing her, chatting aimlessly about anything that came to his mind, and then he brought out the mug runs. She immediately picked out both Buono and Bianchi.
Although from one point of view Mrs. Stofer had now become twice as good a witness as Camden—she picked out both suspects and was a more credible sort of person—from another point of view she posed serious problems. Grogan still could not get her to say what he believed was the truth: that she had gone outside her house to get a very close look. She had poor eyesight, and it was doubtful that a jury would believe that she could have seen Buono and Bianchi clearly enough through her window to identify them, particularly at night, when light reflections from inside would have made seeing even more difficult. Worse, shrubbery had begun to grow up in the yard near the fence, obscuring the view of the street, and by the time of a trial it might obscure it completely. And what would happen to her on the stand? She might have an asthmatic seizure and collapse entirely.
Hillside Stranglers Page 26