Another opening which Boren and Nash had hoped for came when Chaleff and Mader brought in Tanya Dockery to testify that Angelo, far from being brutal and violent, had once tried to sodomize her but had stopped when she had protested. Although some evidence of Buono’s harshness with women had already been admitted, Boren and Nash saw this attempt to show what a gentlemanly fellow Angelo really was as a breakthrough. As Judge George ruled, Dockery’s testimony allowed into evidence Sabra Hannan’s testimony that Angelo had tried to force her into submitting to sodomy, Becky Spears’s testimony that Angelo had injured her by repeated acts of forced sodomy, and Antoinette Lombardo’s testimony that Angelo had sodomized her. The judge kept out some details, including the orgy at the box factory and the attempted extortion of David Wood, but bit by bit the truth was now permitted to emerge.
Some witnesses found it more difficult to talk than others. Sabra Hannan, clearly relishing getting back at Kenny and Angelo, narrated her grotesque experiences in fluent and vivacious detail. She was married now and working as a dental hygienist. Becky Spears, by contrast, was forlorn, sickly-looking, clearly distressed at having to recapitulate her suffering. Perhaps most touching was Antoinette Lombardo, who had so naively loved Angelo and believed in a matrimonial future with him. She was now studying to be a court reporter. Her husband waited for her in the hallway as she managed to describe various horrors, and when she was finally permitted to leave the courtroom, he embraced her.
The work of Paul Tulleners, Boren and Nash’s special investigator, added much to the prosecution’s case. Tulleners was a demon researcher, and over the weeks and months he dug up material no one else had found. To begin with, very little was known about Angelo’s life prior to his linking up with Kenny. Other than Candy, relatives stuck to a policy of omertà, some from fear and others, like Angelo’s sister Cecilia, from loyalty; and Jenny was dead. Angelo, of course, said nothing, except that he did give an interview to a television reporter, Jim Mitchell of KNXT, whom he telephoned from jail saying he wanted to talk. At the jail Angelo told Mitchell:
“I didn’t do nothing, and they’re trying to put me in the gas chamber. If I killed somebody, they have a right to burn me. I believe in that. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I didn’t kill nobody.”
Angelo, whom the reporter described as “a forty-seven-year-old family success story,” continued:
“I voted for the death penalty. If a guy did wrong, kill the son of a bitch. . . . You know that D.A. dropped the case. I didn’t like Kelly but he didn’t have no evidence. But the judge wants to keep it going. I don’t know why. I think he’s biased. Why am I in this courtroom? Because some judge thinks he’s God. I’ve never been in a courtroom before. I don’t know what’s going on. . . .
“Hey, man. I’m getting gassed in that courtroom. I’m getting railroaded. This whole thing has been a political trip from day one.”
Tulleners’s work, however, dug up the truth about Angelo’s background. His juvenile and later court records at first appeared to have been lost or destroyed, but Tulleners patiently hand-searched the files and was able to fill out the picture of a man who had been a bully and a thief since childhood and who had, contrary to his protestations, been in courtrooms and jails many times before.
Tulleners also found Angelo’s first wife, verified Angelo’s failure to support any of his eight children financially, and located Nanette Campina in Florida. He interviewed Nanette there. She was most reluctant to talk. Unlike Candy, she was still afraid of Angelo, and Tulleners could see that it would be impossible to get her to come to Los Angeles voluntarily to testify. Eventually she did begin to confide some stories about Angelo’s brutality, about how she had escaped to Florida, and about how her daughter, Annette, had complained about Angelo’s “advances” to her. But unfortunately Tulleners was accompanied by a young, greenhorn fellow investigator, who reacted with such ill-concealed shock and disgust at Nanette’s revelations that she clammed up from embarrassment. Tulleners had heard enough, however, to conclude that Angelo had raped and beaten Nanette regularly and had certainly slept with his stepdaughter.
It was unlikely that all of this material would be admissible at trial, but all of it bolstered Boren and Nash’s confidence in their case and made them feel even more strongly that their cause was just. Of admissible evidence the most important Tulleners unearthed was the white Mustang Bianchi had named as the car used in the abduction of Kimberly Martin and in the dumping of Cindy Hudspeth’s body. Bianchi had said that the Mustang had stains on the carpet on the passenger side, probably from a leak in the air conditioning. Tulleners checked through thousands of vehicle registrations, narrowed the search to a few hundred, began personally inspecting these, and finally found the right car, the carpet stains still visible. He was able to trace it back to the woman who had consigned it to Angelo for sale in 1977.
When Bianchi took the stand in June 1982, he became the two hundredth witness to testify. It fell to Michael Nash to examine him, and Kenny was less cooperative than ever. He denied remembering anything about any murders. He had been scheduled to testify for a month, more or less; now it looked as though he would be through in a day. But in a court session in which Bianchi’s lawyer, but not Bianchi himself, was present, Judge George let drop the question whether Kenny was violating his plea-bargain agreement to testify against Buono. After all, hadn’t Bianchi agreed to testify fully and freely? If he was found to be in violation of the agreement, he would have to serve his time in Walla Walla, something Bianchi had thought it worth bargaining to avoid.
Having had an evening to consider the prospect of Walla Walla, Kenny began talking again the next day, still contradicting himself but at least giving Nash the opportunity to catch him in lies or in inadvertent truths. Boren and Nash were so meticulously prepared—they developed a filing system that enabled them to locate any of the thousands of documents quickly, and they devised a daily summary of the transcript, which by October 1982 had grown to over twenty-five thousand pages—that they were able to elicit some revealing points from Bianchi, particularly about his association with Buono before the murders. Kenny always looked directly at Nash and never at Angelo. The only interchange between the cousins came when Kenny described having intercourse with a girlfriend of Angelo’s on the water bed, something he knew Angelo would have been furious about had he known. As Kenny told of the event, obviously pleased with himself, Angelo quietly gave him the finger.
If Nash was skillful at eliciting from Bianchi elements of his relationship with Buono, Chaleff was also good at confusing matters when he questioned Bianchi, who was glad to help with contradictions. By the time Bianchi stepped down, after five months on the stand, most of it under cross-examination by Chaleff, Nash privately confessed himself ready to strangle the witness, and he worried whether the jury had become over-whelmed by all the testimony. If muddlement was Chaleff’s strategy, he was doing well with it.
One afternoon after the day’s session, Jerry Cunningham, Judge George’s bailiff, a young sheriff’s deputy with a fresh and open face, remarked to the judge that it was a shame that a guy as intelligent and articulate as Ken Bianchi had not put his talents to better use.
“A guy like that,” Cunningham said, “he could have made something of himself. He could have gone someplace in society. Done something useful.”
“Yes,” Judge George said. “He could have been another Albert Speer.”
Suddenly, in the middle of Bianchi’s testimony in October, the defense made a major move. Katherine Mader had belatedly discovered that Markust Camden had spent time in a mental hospital, and the defense accused Frank Salerno and Pete Finnigan of deliberately withholding this information, in violation of California’s discovery rule. Chaleff and Mader alleged that there had been “willful law enforcement misconduct which has made a sham of the prosecution of Angelo Buono” in that “specific critical impeachment information regarding Markust Camden’s credibility was known by Sgt. Frank S
alerno and Deputy Peter Finnigan in 1979, and [has] been deliberately withheld from the defense since that time.” The motion also claimed that since Salerno and Finnigan withheld the truth about Camden from the magistrate who had issued the search warrant for Angelo Buono’s house, all evidence obtained in that search, including the fiber and carpet material and Angelo’s wallet, should be suppressed. Salerno and Finnigan were part of a “conspiracy to convict Angelo Buono.” They were aware that Camden “has spent almost his entire adult life institutionalized in mental facilities.” They were aware that he had been “hospitalized as ‘delusional’ and ‘psychotic’ at the time of Sheriffs’ contacts with him in 1979. . . . Salerno and Finnigan, as a deliberate pattern of conduct, failed to maintain contact with potential witnesses who contradicted Markust Camden” (an apparent reference to the long-forgotten and discounted Pam Pelletier, who, since she had been hypnotized, could not now have testified). They had by allowing Camden to testify “and by not coming forward with information they possessed regarding Camden’s mental capacity, perpetrated a fraud upon the court.”
In light of these charges against Salerno and Finnigan, the defense moved to dismiss the case “due to denial of due process.” If that were denied, the defense called for the declaration of a mistrial.
Headlines the next morning read:
COPS ON TRIAL
IN BUONO CASE?
TWENTY-THREE
Judge George took the new motion to dismiss under submission. The prosecution would have to be given time to reply, and he would need extensive preparation to make his ruling. Alleged police misconduct had become perhaps the most frequently stated reason for appellate reversals of criminal convictions in recent years. In 1976, for instance, the California Court of Appeal had reversed a defendant’s conviction for burglary because police officers coming upon a burglary in progress had not stopped to knock at the door and announce their purpose before entering the house, arresting the burglar, and seizing the evidence. Mindful of his commitment to “the practice of preventive jurisprudence,” the judge would have to construct a careful ruling in order to avoid having it overturned later by a higher court—especially if he ruled against the defense, as, after reviewing the facts, he was inclined to do. If Salerno and Finnigan could be shown to have deliberately concealed Markust Camden’s mental problems, their conduct could easily be construed as grounds for at least a mistrial.
Meanwhile the trial poked along. In December, over defense objections, the jury was taken on a series of elaborately planned excursions to the locations central to the prosecution’s case: 703 East Colorado, apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind, 809 East Garfield, the railroad diner, Alta Terrace Drive, and all the other abduction and body sites. The prosecution and the detectives, including Sergeant Roger Brown of the Glendale P.D., who had original responsibility for the Lissa Kastin investigation, orchestrated these “jury-views” to demonstrate the plausibility of the killers’ movements. Each juror was given an elaborate itinerary.
But the jury-views could not proceed before the judge resolved a dilemma. Angelo had the right to be present at these as at all phases of his trial, but security required that he be shackled when transported anywhere, as he was each morning and afternoon when he was taken to and from the courthouse and the jail. Earlier that year the California Supreme Court had reversed a voluntary manslaughter conviction because the defendant had been seen, against his wishes, in jail clothes by the jury, and the shackling of defendants in court had caused other reversals. Angelo did not want the jurors to see him in shackles, and if they did the Supreme Court would certainly find this prejudicial. The judge resolved the dilemma by advising Angelo that he also had the right not to go along on the jury-views. Angelo was told that he could go or not, but if he did, it must be in shackles. He decided not to go.
The judge and jury were transported to the jury-views in a Sheriff’s Department van, escorted by motorcycle police, the detectives and attorneys following in separate cars. Each principal detective acted as a sort of master of ceremonies at the location for which he had primary investigative responsibility, with Salerno piecing together what had happened at the railroad diner, Grogan pointing out how and where Lauren Wagner had been abducted, and so on. The excursions were taken at night to convey authentic circumstances. Grogan was anxious about what the jury would think of Beulah Stofer’s testimony when they saw that the shrubbery in her yard now blocked completely the view from her front window to the street. (Mrs. Stofer still maintained that this had been her vantage point, so Boren and Nash had decided not to introduce her having picked both Buono and Bianchi out in the mug runs, since identification from behind the window would have seemed impossible. She had testified simply that she had definitely seen two men.) To solve the shrubbery problem, Grogan took Mrs. Stofer’s garden shears and chopped the shrubbery back down to its 1977 level. The defense objected heatedly to the sergeant’s landscaping, to which he admitted in court, but the judge found no fault with it.
The most dramatic of the jury-views was the visit to the “cow patch” on Landa Street. The jurors were able to see how obscure a place it was, concluding, so the prosecution hoped, that only someone who like Angelo had lived for years in the area would know about it and could find it quickly, especially in the dark. To emphasize this point, on the way up to Landa Street, Paul Tulleners pointed out Jenny Buono’s house, where Angelo had grown up, and the house on Glover Street, where Candy still lived and where Angelo had lived with her. Then at the cow patch, as the jury looked down the hill toward the trash heap in the darkness, Dudley Varney described how the bodies of Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson had looked when he had found them.
As the jurors waited in the December darkness on this hillside overlooking the Elysian Valley, Dudley Varney said to them: “Please follow visually the helicopter you see above you. It will turn on its spotlight to point out certain locations to us. In each instance, I’ll then tell you what location that is.” One by one the helicopter flew over the fateful places, switching on its spotlight and illuminating each as Dudley Varney identified its significance. Up behind the cow patch, “That is the place on Alvarado where Kimberly Martin’s body was found.” Below and to the north, “That is the Golden State Freeway offramp where Jane King’s body was found.” Farther north, Jenny Buono’s house. Across the Elysian Valley, Lauren Wagner, Kristina Weckler. And in the center, Angelo’s house, or at least where it had been.
This performance had been Boren and Nash’s idea, when they had cased the cow patch during the day and noticed how many of the key locations could be seen from that spot. They hoped the illuminations would have a powerful effect on the jury. Afterward, standing in the courthouse parking lot, the jury gone home, Grogan told the prosecutors:
“That was some show! Jesus. Mikey, Roger, I tell you, Warner Brothers couldn’t have done it better.”
The judge said it had reminded him of a son et lumière display he had witnessed at Pompeii, where spotlights had also illuminated scenes of death.
I like this fucking judge, Grogan thought. Please God don’t let anything happen to him.
Just then Katherine Mader, in a jocular mood as she drove out of the parking lot, made a playful swerve toward the detectives and the prosecutors. Grogan did not think it was funny.
“That bitch’ll be able to buy a dozen more of those Mercedes,” Grogan said, “with the taxpayers’ money she’s making defending that asshole.”
Grogan surpassed all the detectives in his aversion to Katherine Mader, because she had made a special point of trying to undermine his credibility every time he took the stand. Once, when he had said that Angelo’s accent reminded him of Brooklyn, she asked whether he had ever been to Brooklyn. Of course he had, he said, but you didn’t have to go to Brooklyn to know what a Brooklyn accent was. Then she asked him what his own accent was. Boston, he replied, glowering. How, Mader wanted to know, could someone with a Boston accent living in Los Angeles identify a man born in Rochester w
ho had lived forty years in Los Angeles as having a Brooklyn accent? Grogan said nothing, but he vowed at that moment to get back at her someday. He did not care for people who implied ridicule of his Boston accent or mocked it as though it were some sort of mental impediment.
On another occasion, Mader tried to impugn Grogan’s testimony that he had observed a space between Angelo’s front teeth when interviewing him. She asked Grogan to come down from the stand, go over to the defendant, and look into Angelo’s mouth. Grogan did so, clenching his fists to control his anger as everyone in the courtroom saw the big detective bend down to peer at Angelo, who leaned his head back and bared his teeth at Grogan with obvious malice. There was no space. What this proved, other than that Mader was trying to make a fool of him, Grogan could not imagine. Later he found out that Angelo had had dental work done since the 1979 interview.
Angelo’s teeth, or one of them, threatened to delay the trial for weeks at one point. He had complained of a toothache, and since by law a defendant must be able to concentrate his full faculties on the proceedings, undistracted by molar or other pain, a dentist was summoned, first the regular jail dentist and then a specialist, who announced that Mr. Buono needed root canal work. There would be several appointments, over a period of three to four weeks. Trial would have to be adjourned on those occasions. But someone, perhaps knowing that dentists tend to be law-and-order types, telephoned the root canal specialist anonymously and reminded him that it was costing the taxpayers about five thousand dollars a day every day that the trial was adjourned. “I understand,” the dentist replied. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He pulled Buono’s tooth that afternoon, saying how sorry he was that it could not be saved. The prosecutors were relieved, since they figured that once Buono realized how easily he could foul up the trial, he might discover a new toothache or other affliction every day. Now, with his tooth a thing of the past, he might think having the trial continue preferable to losing another tooth or perhaps something even more precious—“I wish Angelo would get a pain in his balls,” Grogan said.
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