Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

  “Walker,” Dr. Allison repeated. “Where’d he get that name? Do you know his parents?”

  “He didn’t have any parents. Stevie was alone.”

  After further infantile excursions, Dr. Allison asked Kenny to grow up to his current age and said that he wanted to talk to Stevie now. “What’s your name?”

  “Steve.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  This time Kenny decided not to play the last-name game. He was uncertain about the wisdom of giving Steve a last name and decided to concentrate instead on getting into character as quickly as possible, so he replied:

  “You’re the motherfucker who’s been trying to get me to leave [Ken].”

  “You can’t,” Dr. Allison said.

  “Fucker.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “What business is it of yours? What’re you, writing a fucking book?” To divert Dr. Allison further from the surname question, Kenny took out a cigarette and ripped off the filter, lighting the butt with his best macho manner.

  “Ashtrays are in the chair over there,” Dr. Allison offered.

  “I know where the fucking ashtrays are, you don’t have to tell me. Oh, fucking assholes, you know, I was doing fine, I come out whenever I fucking felt like it. Now you got to stick your goddam nose in this whole shitty mess. I was doing fine, you know. Now I can’t even fucking come out when I want to.”

  Snarling and ranting, Kenny as Steve attacked Ken: “Fuck him, his mother too.”

  “She was pretty weird . . .?” Dr. Allison offered helpfully.

  “Fucking cunt.”

  “She was quite a bitch, wasn’t she?”

  “She was a fucking cunt. You know, he still puts up with her shit a little bit. You know, I mean, granted, I can’t come out, but I can see what he’s doing, and fuck, man, he has got to wise up.”

  “But you did get yourself in a jam.”

  “He got himself into a jam. I fucking killed those broads, you know, to smarten him up, to show him that he couldn’t push me fucking around.”

  The idea of Ken pushing Steve around, rather than the reverse, was new, but Kenny pretended to rave on. He said that he, as Steve, had killed the Bellingham girls to get rid of Ken, to “get him out of the way.” This concept derived, of course, from Kenny’s attempt to banish Angelo from his thoughts by doing murder on his own; in this sense Angelo remained Kenny’s constant inspiration, acting not only as the model for the Steve character but as the source of Steve’s motives, as Kenny invented them.

  “Let me clue you,” Kenny said, “it’s a fucked job you got.”

  “True,” Dr. Allison said, “and that’s—”

  “You know, you should go out and live a little bit.”

  “I find [my job] interesting.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “How about down in L.A., with Angelo?”

  “Angelo. Now, he’s my kind of person,” Kenny said, silently indicating the Angelo-Steve identification but not so that Dr. Allison would notice it as the source of fiction.

  “Um. How so?”

  “He just—he doesn’t care a fuck about life . . . . It’s great. Other people’s life. Doesn’t give a fuck. That’s great. That’s a good attitude to have.”

  Kenny went on to elaborate on the Angelo-Steve connection, describing how Angelo and Steve had killed the girls in Los Angeles, with Ken an innocent bystander. It was, with all the evidence against him, as close as Kenny could get to blaming everything on Angelo. But then, pride surpassing discretion, Kenny suggested that Steve had given Angelo the idea in the first place and that Steve had killed the first girl—“some black broad”—on the freeway.

  When Dr. Allison began to press for details of the killings, Kenny, not wanting to reveal too complete a capacity for recall too soon, decided to heighten the impression of Steve as a wildly irrational creature, menacing, out of control. He jabbed the air with the defiltered cigarette and stood up, shouting:

  “That’s [Ken’s] problem! It’s not my fucking problem. I want him out of the way! You don’t really know, you don’t fucking understand that I want him out! I don’t want to sit here anymore!” He took a swipe toward the videotape camera. “I don’t want no fucking cameras! Turn that shit off!”

  “Just sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, cool off, cool off . . .” Dr. Allison held up his hand, as if trying to calm an evil spirit. “You don’t have to talk to me anymore.”

  “That’s right, I don’t. And I don’t fucking want to either!”

  “Okay, you can go back where you came from.”

  “I don’t want to. I want to stay now.”

  Kenny slumped back into his chair and pretended to fall into a trance.

  “Ken’s going to have to come out,” Dr. Allison said, urged, seemed to pray. “Ken is going to have to come out! Come out Ken! Come out Ken! Ken?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You here?”

  “I’m here.”

  Dr. Allison pointed to the cigarette in Kenny’s hand.

  “When did I take this out of my pack?” Kenny asked in his sweet-tempered Ken-voice, acting for all the world like a bewildered child. “I don’t remember taking it out of my pack.”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Allison reassured him. “You were in a trance at that time.”

  “Why’s the filter broken off?”

  “Just a hand broke it off. Don’t you break off filters?”

  “No,” Kenny said, his voice rising in wonder, “I can’t smoke a nonfiltered cigarette.” The delicate boy.

  “I guess somebody around here smokes without a filter,” Dr. Allison suggested. “You ever found that before? Where and when?”

  “At different times, you know, around apartments I’ve had.”

  Kenny was simply reacting to the law of supply and demand: if Dr. Allison wanted to know where and when, Kenny would supply him with an answer. And Dr. Allison’s voice was so soothing and encouraging. Dr. Allison said that it looked as though Steve had been at work again, as though Steve were a mischievous leprechaun. All at once Steve was now playing devilish little tricks on poor Ken.

  Dr. Allison was relieved to be talking to Ken again instead of Steve. The doctor, although he had diagnosed many multiple personality cases before this one, had never talked to what he believed was a multiple personality who was also a murderer until Bianchi. The doctor had been frightened by what he perceived as Steve’s murderous anger and was glad that, as he believed, he had succeeded in banishing Steve at a crucial moment. Dr. Allison considered himself lucky, although he also prided himself on his skill and bravery in dismissing this monster. He had feared that he was about to become Steve’s next victim. Kenny’s act had been that successful.

  Before sending Kenny to his cell, Dr. Allison asked him to try to dream that night about Steve, unusual though it was for a psychiatrist to suggest the subject of a dream to a patient. He asked him to dream how “to cope with Stevie, with the aid of the highest elements of helping power inside [Ken’s] mind. That will be the job for tonight.” Dr. Allison’s voice was soothing. He added: “I want you to keep that diary going! That’s very, very important.” Kenny could not have agreed more.

  The next day Dr. Allison asked Kenny to see whether he could talk to Steve directly. Kenny responded with a rambling stream-of-consciousness monologue, or rather a bizarre imitation of one, in which he pretended to reminisce about childhood. He acted like a medium making contact with a dead relative, pausing from time to time to permit voices to pass over the great beyond. Dr. Allison was impressed. He said that it had been like listening to someone talk on the telephone without knowing what the party on the other end of the line was saying.

  On the following day Dr. Watkins appeared again and presented Kenny with yet a new opportunity to dissemble. He administered a Rorschach ink blot test to Kenny; or, to put the matter more precisely, he administered the test first to Kenny as Steve and then to Kenny as Ken. Kenny, of course,
knew the test well but pretended ignorance of it, not mentioning that he had often amused himself by administering it to Kelli and others and that he knew what sorts of responses would produce the right results. As Steve he pretended to see in the blots such intriguing phenomena as “two elephants fucking each other.” In another blot he pretended to discern something “like somebody eating out a cherry broad.”

  “Eating out a what?” Dr. Watkins inquired.

  “Cherry broad, man.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Do you understand me?” Kenny asked, not sure that Dr. Watkins was up to Steve’s vocabulary.

  “Of course.”

  And on to another blot:

  “Looks like Siamese twins, doesn’t it, but it’s not. It’s a big dick. . . . It’s two broads getting it on . . . . Looks like an abortion.”

  Then Dr. Watkins summoned Ken.

  “Hi, Dr. Watkins. Have I been sleeping or something?” As he pretended to awake from the trance, Kenny made a fuss over finding his rosary on the table, saying he had no memory of putting it there and drawing a parallel between this mystery and that of the tom cigarette filter with Dr. Allison.

  “What do you think happened?” Dr. Watkins asked.

  “Steve again.”

  “Yeah,” Dr. Watkins agreed. What would Steve think of next?

  Kenny complained sorrowfully about the headaches he had been having.

  “That’s [Steve] trying to get out,” Dr. Watkins said.

  “I wondered why, ’cause I usually don’t get headaches.”

  Now it was time for Keriny as Ken to take the Rorschach test. Where Steve had seen elephants fucking and so on, Ken saw people dancing in a discotheque, children playing London Bridge, two men carrying a bucket, a butterfly, a snail, a moth, a steamboat on the water, two little Indians, a leopard, rocks beside a pond, and the Asian continent. For good measure, not to appear absurdly saccharine, he added two dogs fighting over a bone and “an unborn fetus” as photographed by means of a “radioscoptomy.”

  “You, Ken, are getting stronger every day,” Dr. Watkins said before leaving. “I don’t know how everything’s going to come out, but I suspect you’ll be able to handle things better.”

  “It hasn’t been easy for me,” Kenny said.

  To Dr. Watkins the Rorschach tests substantiated a diagnosis of multiple personality; but to verify the results, he forwarded them to Dr. Erika Fromm, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He told Dr. Fromm nothing about Bianchi, permitting her to assume that the subjects, identified simply as “Mr. K” and “Mr. S,” were two persons.

  Dr. Fromm wrote formal evaluations of the tests, finding “Mr. K” to be “on the whole . . . a near normal man, mildly neurotic, mildly introverted, who possesses a great deal of fantasy.” “Mr. K” also “has greater creative ability than he actually makes use of in his ordinary life” and “spends a great deal of time in daydreaming.” Of “Mr. S’s” responses she wrote, however, that “this is one of the sickest Rorschachs I have seen in working with this test for more than 40 years. It is clearly that of a patient in whose mind sexuality and violent aggression against women are fused. I would expect him to be a rapist and a killer. . . . For the sake of society—as well as for his own sake—he should either be in prison or in a closed ward in a state hospital.” Yet he was “not a psychopath.”

  Since she knew nothing of Bianchi’s background, Dr. Fromm was not in a position even to guess that he might have faked both tests; her evaluations suggest that Kenny had managed to give precisely the impressions he had intended. In an informal, covering letter to Dr. Watkins, Dr. Fromm said that she wondered why she had been sent two such radically different personalities to evaluate: one seemed to her likely to be a criminal, but the other seemed so normal that she could not imagine why he should be in court. Was it possible, considering Dr. Watkins’s interest in multiple personalities, that the two tests represented different personalities of the same man? One response by “Mr. S”—“Some cat got hit by a car”—made her wonder whether “Mr. S” might be a black man. The word “cat” might be black slang, “cat” referring to a man. If so, “Mr. S’s” aggression would be directed against men as well as women. Yet he was clearly not a homosexual.

  Dr. Watkins was now sufficiently confident of his diagnosis to give an interview to Time magazine. In the issue of May 7 he was quoted as saying that Kenneth Bianchi, “a very pure psychopath,” had a Doppelgänger inside him who from time to time “seized control of the normally mild-mannered Bianchi.” Dr. Watkins stated that he himself had been afraid of being attacked by Steve, who had first emerged when Bianchi was nine years old and was a product of Bianchi’s unhappy childhood.

  The Time interview was too much for Bob Grogan. Alarmed by what Salerno and Finnigan had told him about the goings-on in Bellingham, Grogan had been monitoring the videotapes of the psychiatric sessions: under Washington law “discovery” worked both ways; both defense and prosecution were entitled to review any evidence before it was formally introduced in a trial. Grogan had already formed a low opinion of Drs. Watkins and Allison. He was certain that Bianchi was putting on an act, and now, on a piece of plain stationery, identifying himself simply as an outraged citizen, he wrote a letter to Dr. Watkins in Montana. He attacked Dr. Watkins for the Time interview, calling him “a bush league unprofessional turkey” and accusing him of trying to get national publicity for himself at the expense of a fair and effective trial for a murderer. The sanity hearing had not yet been held. What right, Grogan asked, did Dr. Watkins, in violation of any sort of legal or medical ethics, have to give out his ridiculous diagnosis to a national newsmagazine at this point? At least the other doctors had been discreet. He signed the letter simply “Bob Grogan,” not wishing to take advantage of his police affiliation nor to end up being accused of trying to intimidate a witness.

  Dr. Watkins replied, defending himself. When asked about Dr. Watkins’s letter, Grogan said: “I counted nine typos. I’ll bet because I called the guy a turkey he probably thinks my mother took away my Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe I shouldn’t have pissed the guy off. If I ever murder anybody I might need him. I think I’ve got another personality inside me. His name is Derrick and he plays with his pee-pee and has a thing for shrinks.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Kenny was delighted with the way things were going. He read Dr. Watkins’s Time interview with pleasure and pride and said in a tape he sent to Kelli: “Things are looking really good. Dean [Brett] and a lot of other people know now that I’m not guilty. It’s just a matter of getting all the data together.” But just to be sure, he kept up the elaborate fiction of his diary, adding dreams and feigned realizations. When Kelli wrote him about an article she had read about Sigmund Freud, Kenny took the opportunity to give himself the benefit of a spontaneous Freudian analysis in his diary:

  In 1923 [Freud] finally set out his well-known triad of id, ego and super-ego. He proposed that the id is unconscious and the instinctional without moral judgment. That the super-ego is partly unconscious and represents the rules instilled by one’s parents and society—the voice of guilt. And the ego is the conscious ego which is able to relate and adapt to the outside world.

  I think that the problem that’s been is that . . . Steve could be part of the id . . . because the id is unconscious and instinctional without moral judgment. That’s really an interesting hypothesis. Anyway, just thought I’d mention it at this time.

  As always, modern psychological theory offered him an agreeable escape from personal responsibility. And he liked playing in his diary with the word “responsibility,” as though it were something apart from himself, an idea, a thing, a curiosity, occasionally toyed with and questioned but never assumed: “I’m filled with this false sense of responsibility, not meaning that the feeling is false, meaning that I really shouldn’t blame myself for what has happened. . . .” Always “what has happened,” never “what I have done.” To Kelli he said, as if
congratulating himself, citing as usual a psychological authority: “John [Johnson] mentioned that in actuality I am a victim. . . . If you ever have any questions or don’t understand anything about dissociative reaction, I’m not an expert but I’m gaining a lot of personal knowledge. . . . I hope the book I’m going to write will help people. This will be my repayment for what has happened. Now that I’m aware of what has happened, I would trade my life for bringing all those girls back. But that’s not possible. Dean says I shouldn’t blame myself. I wasn’t responsible for what happened.

  “Anyway, when you get the film for the camera, take a picture of the kitty for me. You know, I never realized before I can get shots for my allergy [to cats].”

  He spoke to Kelli of his plans for the family after he was released. They would sit in the park and enjoy the air. He missed her cooking. Money would be no problem: “When I get out, honey, I know that the publishing deal’s going to go through.” The book would be a best-seller, and once it hit the best-seller list, there would be still more money: “That’s the reality of publishing a successful book, a popular book.” Fortunately “I won’t even have to have the book started before they come across with the money. Just a contractual obligation.”

  Of course, Kenny did not tell Kelli that he had already proposed marriage and a book to Angie Kinneberg, nor did he tell her that he had asked Angie to spy on Kelli, whom he suspected of two-timing him. Perhaps Kelli could become his full-time secretary when he got out. As she knew, “every worth-while thing in life is won with hard work and practice and patience.”

  Kenny always remembered his “dear son Ryan” in these letters and tapes:

  . . . Well, sweetheart, I think I’ll end this for now. When I think of you and Ryan I have a tendency to get mushy. I don’t want to get too mushy here. I don’t know how you’ll take it. . . .

  This part is for Ryan. Ryan [Kenny crooned, called], Rrrryyyaaannn. Daddy’s here. Come on, Ryan. Talk to Daddy. Say hi. Say hi, Ryan. Come on, say hi. Come on, tinkers. My little tinkers. Daddy’s little man. Perhaps Daddy will be home soon, sweetheart. I love you and miss you, you little man. Bye-bye. Bye.