Meanwhile, Kenny, performing again as Steve for Dr. Watkins, added that the killings had taken place at Angelo’s house, named Kristina Weckler as a neighbor at the Garfield apartments, alluded to dump sites off the Golden State Freeway, and spoke of alternating with Angelo in doing the actual stranglings.
He improved his characterization of Steve, building on his received hypothesis that Steve was supposed to be an alter ego, as opposite as possible from the kindly Ken. He added sprinklings of profanity—“They’re fucking bugging me, damn it, leave me alone! Fuck what a drag, you know I just want to be me! Fucking shrinks!”—and a snarl to his delivery; and he laughed frequently, like the villain in a melodrama. The more extreme this bizarre impersonation became, the phonier it appeared to Salerno and Finnigan. Salerno wrote “bullshit” twice more in his notebook. But Dr. Watkins showed not a sign of disbelief.
Ken, Steve spat, was “an asshole” and “a motherfucker” whom Steve controlled totally. Steve had tricked or forced Ken into bad habits, not only murder but “thinking dirty” and smoking cigarettes. Kenny also had Steve develop a spontaneous case of faulty grammar—“We didn’t keep no tabs”—and turned on the sympathetic, solicitous Dr. Watkins, calling him “a drag.”
“All right,” Dr. Watkins shrugged, “I’m a drag. I’m sorry.”
The primary source of Kenny’s creative characterization of Steve was Angelo Buono, the one person he had ever been close to who acted consistently like a classic tough guy and who certainly could be said to have functioned as Kenny’s alter ego in Los Angeles. Angelo was indeed the perfect model for Steve, so like any artist Kenny was able to draw a character from life. But art too begets art, and Kenny also had in his mind the example of Sally Field portraying one of Sybil’s alter egos as a rough-edged prostitute, the flying nun become a whore. Although his theatrical methodology was sound enough and his performance was convincing to Dr. Watkins, Kenny would never have passed a screen test. Or, to be fair to him, his acting never rose above the level of a primitive television series or the outsized gestures of the villain in an old B western. He might have been cast for a minor part in a high school production of Guys and Dolls. Still, as they say in Hollywood, you don’t argue with success.
When Dr. Watkins dismissed Steve again for the day—“Well, nice talking to you, Steve. Why don’t you just go wherever you need to go. I’d kind of like to talk to Ken now”—Kenny switched back immediately to his accustomed role as Mr. Nice Guy:
“Nice talking to you. Thank you, doctor. Have a nice trip, now.”
Although he had now betrayed Angelo, Kenny had not done so without deliberation. After his arrest his first impulse had been to cement the pact of silence with Angelo and, he hoped, to use his cousin as a character reference just as he had done on job applications. Between the two of them, Kenny thought, alibis at least for the Los Angeles killings could be cooked up. He quickly wrote Angelo a letter alluding to their family ties. But Angelo’s response had been a phone call to Kenny threatening to kill Kelli and Ryan if Kenny snitched. (Angelo used cryptic language, assuming that the jailhouse phone was bugged, which it was not, but Kenny got the message. When Kenny later disclosed the threatening call, Grogan and Finnigan knew that they had caught Angelo in another lie, since he had denied contacting Kenny in Bellingham.) On February 27, Kenny tried to reach Angelo indirectly. “Dear Mom and Dad,” Kenny wrote to his mother and her second husband:
Angelo took me in sight unseen [in 1976]. He’s a loner and took me in. He may have been a criminal years ago, but he’s got two.[?] legitimate businesses and although not always Kosher, he’s not a terrible egg. None of us are perfect. I want you to call him for me, see how he’s doing. I wrote him to say hi. Tell him this, that I wish he could write the letter I asked him to write. . . .
P.S. Don’t tell Kelli. She dislikes Angelo because he used to tease her all the time.
Had Kelli known what Angelo had threatened she would have had a better reason to dislike him.
When even this roundabout approach to Angelo failed to produce so much as a friendly note—Angelo was not about to “say hi” to his accomplice—Kenny knew that his only hope to save himself lay in implicating Angelo; if he could incorporate the betrayal into the multiple personality act, he might walk. But, like almost anyone facing possible execution, Kenny was willing to try anything, and he could hardly be sure the multiple personality scheme would work. An alibi would be even better. He wrote again to his mother, this time enclosing a crudely hand-printed, supposedly anonymous letter that implicated a boyfriend of one of the murdered Bellingham girls. He implored his mother to fly to Seattle and mail the faked letter from there to the Bellingham police. She did not comply with her son’s request, although she did come to Bellingham to see him. Alone and face to face with him, she could only weep, unable to doubt his guilt, feeling sorry for him but ashamed. Eventually she broke down and told the police that her son had been a liar as far back as she could remember.
But Kenny, ever resourceful, tried another woman. Angie Kinneberg, one of the girls to whom he had sent Christmas flowers in Bellingham, came to see him in jail, and he managed to slip letters to her, fifty-seven in all, and three postcards. He begged her to give him an alibi, to say that he had been with her on the night of the Bellingham murders: “If I had come over I could have you testify under oath of my whereabouts Thursday night. I have no alibi from 8:10 till 9:50 p.m.” To Angie he maintained his innocence: “I could never take another’s life. I was set up . . . I keep dreaming like an old Perry Mason show that all of a sudden somebody steps up to say I was with them the night in question.” “Please help me if you can, I’m begging for my life. When I read the autopsy reports I became sick. Karen was a nice girl when I knew her several months ago. I’d like to get my hands on who did this to these girls.” “If you can find the strength in your heart to help me you can include the times in your letter along with the place.” To try to tempt her, he began talking to her about collaborating on a book about himself and alluded to a possible hundred-thousand-dollar advance. He professed his love for her and, of course, proposed marriage. Angie told Kenny’s mother about the proposal; his mother said that Kenny would never get out of prison, so Angie might as well accept to make him happy.
Angie did go so far as to write Kenny a note that provided him an alibi, but, conscience-stricken, she told Dean Brett that it was a lie and asked him to tear it up. As Kenny’s multiple personality ruse began to look as if it might work, he dropped the search for an alibi and admitted to Angie that his “other self” might have done the killings. He had been merely a “watchful voyeur.” He could never take a life. That was the reason he had avoided going into the army. Even the thought of something like prostitution “turns me off. I’ve never condoned the selling of one’s body for any reason. The body to me is sacred and I’m not even religious.” He asked her to go to the library and read up on everything she could find on multiple personalities, to help him understand himself, he said. At the same time he began seeing a Catholic priest, Father Don Warner, and spoke of regaining his faith. Father Warner gave him a rosary, and Kenny began carrying it and displaying it during subsequent interviews with psychiatrists.
Two more doctors arrived to interview him, one at the request of the court, the other called by the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, but since neither employed hypnosis Kenny had to keep Steve under wraps. He concentrated on trying to depict his mother as “very stern on punishment,” mindful that he had to appear to have been an abused child, and on inventing Sybil-like dreams. Like Sybil and Eve, he also announced that he was suffering from headaches.
To add to these orchestrated impressions, Kenny began keeping a diary, knowing that it would be read by his doctors. He managed to write down something in it almost every day, and by the time he was finished with it he had scribbled more than twenty-five thousand phony words. He emphasized lurid dreams modeled on Sybil’s dreams, with recurring themes of entrapment,
pursuit, violence, visions of escape or death. And he made sure to mention his mother frequently, always portraying her as a villain, himself as her victim.
Kenny’s approach to his situation was something like that of a spy caught behind enemy lines. He knew what role he was supposed to play if his captors were finally to be convinced that he was genuinely what he was trying to appear to be. He knew the value that the enemy would place on documentation. If the documents were lacking, he would supply them:
I was running down a dark hallway—I could see a light at the end—but I wasn’t reaching it for some reason—I ran and ran and finally reached the end of the hallway, lighted and I couldn’t move forward.
At an amusement park I was on a roller coaster ride, it never seemed to end.
He varied entries about such dreams with complaints of headaches, and since he knew it was vital that the doctors perceive him as helpless, he added vignettes of himself as a timid little tyke:
There was a song popular on the radio—I used to be afraid to go to bed at night—the name was “one-eyed, one-eared flying purple people-eater.” My mother controlled all my relationships.
Occasionally his prose approached babytalk:
. . . for a while I had a pet duck—until it grew too big. I used to like to pick those flowers that if you suck on them they were so sweet. I remember having to go to bed if I didn’t eat everything. . . . When I was sick once my aunt brought me 4 books. I remember being disappointed because she didn’t bring me a toy.
Kenny knew that it was important for him to try to establish that he was capable of understanding himself—in the light of the already assumed perceptions of the doctors—and therefore of becoming one day “integrated” or cured. And so, in writing specifically about his alter ego, Steve, he was careful to suggest that he, Kenny, was making progress and that he was beginning to figure out Steve’s origins:
The name Steve that keeps popping into my head has been familiar. I think I know something now about myself—there is another stronger person inside of me. I think he calls himself Steve. He hates me—hates my mom—hates a lot. I feel this person wants to get me. I’ve had dreams of someone who is a twin but he was exactly opposite from me—for the past few days I feel like my insides were at war—for the past two nights just as I’m about to fall asleep bits and pieces have been forming—the name—the struggle, me against him—in my dreams it felt like the body of the twin was exactly mine but the attitude totally foreign. I feel stronger but scared. I feel hate but I don’t feel like reacting to the feeling. . . . Why does he hate me so much? Where did he come from?
And always he slipped in that his mother had caused this warring split in him:
I dreamt of my mother. She was yelling, screaming. I was backing down some stairs—she was slowly pursuing.
For good measure on April 17 Kenny began adding poems to his diary. Poems had been effective with women; they might make a doctor more sympathetic, too. In them he tried to create the impression that his poetry showed that through art he was able to express a new integration of personality—a somewhat clever idea, when one considers that from Freud on the psychoanalytic community has always considered art the expression of personality and analogous to dreams in its unconscious expression of inner conflicts:
I’m scared
my stomach hurts
there’s no place to run
now,
it was easy to run away
before.
I feel strong, in control
but still unsure
of someone I’ve come to know,
someone I don’t understand
as well as I know myself now. . . .
I’m so alone now, somewhat
I feel naked.
I’m knowing me.
I wish I were free of him.
I want help.
I don’t care for him
and he doesn’t like me.
I feared confinement but
I’m thankful for it now.
Here Kenny picked up on Dr. Watkins’s prediction that he would get stronger, become an “authentic” person. Kenny was clever enough not to suggest that he was already cured—he knew that that would appear premature—but that he was ripe for healing. He wanted to present himself as eager for treatment, so as to lay the basis for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, to be followed by treatment in a mental hospital and a return to the world as a cured maniac. He would try to take advantage of a contemporary willingness on the part of the courts, the doctors, and, to a lesser extent, the public to forget about the real victims and to see the criminal as victim.
With Dr. Watkins’s blessing, Bianchi and his lawyer made known to the court that they intended to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The court, recognizing that whether Bianchi suffered from a multiple personality disorder now represented the crucial issue in determining his ability to stand trial, called in Dr. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist from Davis, California, who had the reputation of being an expert on multiple personalities and was at the time completing work on a book entitled Minds in Many Pieces. Dr. Allison began interviewing Kenny on April 18. That morning Kenny wrote in his diary that he had had a dream the night before about his “twin”:
He told me life wasn’t what I thought it was like, he said there are no rules, you have to make your own, he said he wanted to get me away from people I was leaning on for help. . . . He said he would hurt my kid. I became angry. I stood up and grabbed him, told him I didn’t like him, I punched him, he broke free, I ran after and reached to grab him and he just disappeared. I felt an easy cool breeze, slowly it turned warm.
As if he worried that the doctors would be unable to interpret the significance of this invented dream, Kenny decided to help them out by suggesting an interpretation, which he added in the margin: “This doesn’t feel like a dream, like the dreams I use[d] to have of my father it seemed so very real, too real. . . . If this person is more real than just my dream and if this is the same person haunting me, which is more than likely, then this person could have been responsible for the uncontrollable violence in my life, the instigator of the lies I’ve done, the blank spots I can’t account for and the deaths of the girls; all the ones in California and the two here. But if .he is insane, then he killed them using me—why can’t I remember for sure I want to know if this is so.” Make sure you don’t miss this, doctor, the entry beckons.
But there was no chance that Dr. Ralph Allison would miss it. Dr. Allison was alert to every hint of the presence of multiple personalities. His new book was about them and he had already published five articles and for a time had issued a newsletter on the subject, and for the past three years he had moderated programs at the American Psychiatric Association meetings on multiples, as they were called in the trade. Dr. Allison thought that multiples were about the most exciting phenomenon current in psychiatry, and if anyone was going to recognize one, or them, when he saw it, or them, surely Dr. Allison would. Before the session he read over Kenny’s diary, perused his medical records, and viewed the videotapes from the sessions with Dr. Watkins. He had seen Steve. He was ready, and Kenny was ready for him.
In a gentle, avuncular voice, Dr. Allison sat opposite Kenny in the small interviewing room and began by asking general questions about Kenny’s life, tracing his movements from the East to California and up to Bellingham. Then he told Kenny to respond to certain finger signals which would, supposedly, trigger his unconscious memory. The number of fingers held up represented the years of Kenny’s life, and when the fingers added up to a year that contained some memory, Kenny was supposed to tell Dr. Allison about that memory. At nine, Kenny began talking about his playmates at that age, and when he said that he had enjoyed playing games of hide and seek—“I like hiding. It’s easy to hide away from everything”—Dr. Allison took the bait. If John Johnson and Dr. Watkins and Sybil had given him early leads and suggestions, he was now able to lead Dr. Allison—progress of a kind.
Dr. Allison asked:
“Did you ever hide inside your own head?”
Kenny knew where to go from there:
“Sometimes, just to get away.”
“What do you do in there?”
“Talk.”
“Anybody else in there to talk to?”
This was getting to be old hat for Kenny now. But again he was duly cautious, not naming Steve yet. Kenny knew that he had to make Dr. Allison feel that he, the doctor not the patient, was bringing out the alter ego. Kenny identified the other person as simply “my friend.”
“Who’s that?” Dr. Allison asked obligingly.
“Stevie,” said Kenny, adding the diminutive in consonance with a juvenile memory, or rather the invention of one. “He’s my second best buddy.”
So now Steve had an origin as Stevie.
“Does he have a last name?” Dr. Allison asked.
This question posed a challenge for Kenny. He had not anticipated being asked for a last name, and he did not want to screw up now, having come so far.
“He did have a last name,” Kenny stalled.
“What was it?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Well, what’s Stevie—”
“Walker,” Kenny mumbled, barely audible.
Hillside Stranglers Page 27