Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

  Eyewitnesses: Stofer, Burke, Camden.

  Prior contacts with two victims: Washington, Hudspeth.

  Fiber evidence.

  Consciousness of guilt (destroying badge, handcuffs; lying to Grogan and Finnigan on numerous points; denying owning wallet; lies to TV reporter; jailhouse confession).

  In presenting all this evidence first, without referring at all to Bianchi’s accusations, Nash was following a deliberate strategy, his way of getting around the problem of Bianchi’s credibility. He was trying to get the jury to see that even without Bianchi’s statements, there was plenty enough evidence to convict Buono. Add to it Bianchi, and you had an overwhelming case, far more than the “slight” corroborating evidence needed by law to substantiate the testimony of an accomplice. Nash now listed fourteen revelations by Bianchi to the police in Bellingham which had turned out to be accurate and which corroborated many of the other points of evidence. He then concluded by breaking down the evidence on each murder count separately and, finally, by dismissing Veronica Compton’s testimony. She would have testified either way, he said, depending on who called her as a witness.

  Gerald Chaleff’s argument consisted mainly of an extended attack on Bianchi’s credibility, the premise being that Kenny had acted alone and would not have implicated Angelo at all except by way of bargaining for his own life. For most of nine days Chaleff presented Bianchi as the master deceiver who had fooled everyone from girlfriends to doctors and lawyers. He tried to argue that to convict Angelo the jury would have to believe Bianchi “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but when Boren objected to this line of reasoning, the judge cautioned Chaleff: “beyond a reasonable doubt” applied to the case as a whole, not to Bianchi’s individual testimony, which was not subject to the same standard of credibility as was the actual issue of Buono’s guilt. The jury could choose which parts of Bianchi’s testimony to accept and which to reject. Chaleff continued with his theme to the end, however, finishing with this admonition: “If you say to yourself, ‘I am going to convict Angelo Buono,’ then you also say to yourself, ‘Kenneth Bianchi has fooled me, too.’ ”

  Roger Boren in his closing argument ridiculed the idea of Bianchi as such a successful liar, pointing out that people had seen through him all his life. He was the secondary character in the murders, really, acting as Angelo’s mouthpiece. Boren said that a good word to describe the accumulated evidence was “propinquity,” which could mean nearness in time or place and kinship or nearness of relationship. The evidence showed a propinquity between Bianchi and Buono and a propinquity among Angelo’s house, the murders, and the body sites.

  In the midst of Boren’s argument, which took eleven days to deliver, the judge had to admonish Katherine Mader for distracting the jury by reacting visually and audibly to Boren’s statements. One male juror made it known after the trial that she had been staring at him throughout the prosecution’s final arguments—"eyeballing me” was his phrase—and that he had turned her away only by, he said, staring up her dress. At the bench Judge George told her:

  “I don’t appreciate sighs. Will you please learn to conduct yourself professionally? I mean that, Mrs. Mader. I have had enough of that. So while we are talking about it, I have not brought it up but I was advised by the bailiff and started looking: you sat there shaking your head when you didn’t like things that Mr. Boren [was saying]. I do not appreciate sighs or laughter.”

  Later during Boren’s argument, when Mader began clipping and filing her nails in front of the jury, the judge was inclined to admonish her again but let it pass.

  Roger Boren spoke of the dead as though they had been his own daughters. As it happened he did have seven children—one fewer than Angelo—and he had come to take the case acutely to heart. A large, sandy, balding man, he was weary by the end, like everyone .else, but he had developed a sense of mission about getting a conviction against Angelo. A Mormon, it was not at all difficult for Boren to believe that God was on his side in this instance. Although the jury knew nothing of Boren’s personal life or beliefs, he was probably the ideal kind of man to have the last word against Angelo. His argument was precise and exhaustive, but his manner carried equal weight. He never showed his anger, never raised his voice, but his tone conveyed an unobtrusive moral indignation that complemented his logic. In the end he compared the evidence to a large house made of sturdy old brick. You could chip away at the brick, he said, but through it all the house still stood. And Angelo’s house, though it had been demolished under suspicious circumstances, still stood at the center of the evidence: it had been the “epicenter” of that terrible earthquake of terror that had shaken the city six years before. He concluded:

  The defense at the end of their argument said to you that you could be fooled by Kenneth Bianchi.

  I will say to you that in the face of all this evidence . . . both in corroboration of Kenneth Bianchi and independent of Kenneth Bianchi—if in the face of reason Angelo Buono is not convicted of murder of these ten women, then you will have been fooled by Kenneth Bianchi.

  You will have been fooled by him and you will also have been fooled by Angelo Buono over there and by his two attorneys.

  The evidence supports his guilt and a finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Good luck and thank you.

  When Judge George, after hearing arguments from the attorneys, announced to them in conference that he had decided to sequester the jury until they reached a verdict, certain hostilities, if they did not explode, surfaced. Chaleff and Mader maintained that to sequester the jury now, after they had been free to go home to their families at night for two years, would act on them as pressure for an early or even a premature verdict. But the judge said that newspapers and television stations were planning to do stories on the jurors. He could not take the risk after all this time that some reporter would try to contact a juror during deliberations: that would cause a mistrial, and to have a mistrial now was unthinkable. The Los Angeles Times alone had assigned six reporters to do nothing but background checks on the jurors. During the trial itself reporters had tried to do stories about various jurors and had, fortunately, been discouraged. In the last month in Los Angeles there had been two mistrials because of improper approaches to jurors. Even a chance encounter in a grocery store, the judge said, could cause a mistrial. A friend could advise a juror what to do—that would be enough.

  One of Gerald Chaleff’s several talents as a criminal defense lawyer was to discover, after a trial was over, just such jury misconduct or jury tampering as the judge had described. Chaleff was not, therefore, at all happy with the decision to sequester, since it effectively closed off a last avenue of defense.

  “I think personally,” Chaleff told the judge, “I have stated throughout the record, that at times the court has done things which I felt were unfair to the defendant. And I think at this time that the only purpose of sequestration is to put pressure on the jury to arrive at some verdict, whatever that verdict may be.”

  Chaleff continued in this vein. The judge interrupted him:

  “I think your remarks are very much out of line . . . . I resent the implication that somehow the court is again doing something as part of some grand conspiracy and is unfair to you and your client.”

  “No grand conspiracy,” Chaleff said.

  “I resent it and I think it is inappropriate and unprofessional.”

  The jurors were escorted to two hotels, the twelve actual jurors to one and the four remaining alternates to another. Each day the twelve would be taken back to the jury room in the courthouse to deliberate from nine to twelve o’clock and from one-thirty to four. Bailiffs were with them twenty-four hours a day. In the evenings, after dinner at the hotel or at a restaurant chosen by the bailiffs, the jurors could watch television as a group, with a bailiff switching off the set whenever anything about the trial was broadcast. They could read newspapers and magazines, but only after a bailiff had cut out stories about the trial.

  Man
y stories about this jury had already appeared in Los Angeles publications and in the national newsmagazines. That the jurors had managed to associate together without apparent conflict throughout what had now become the longest criminal trial in the history of the United States, perhaps in the known history of the world, was itself news. They had given themselves a party on the first and second anniversaries of the proceedings, and they celebrated one another’s birthdays. They were prisoners of a peculiar sort of modem war, hostages to justice, and like prisoners of other kinds of wars they tried to make the best of their predicament. If one or another of them had a particular hardship, Judge George would adjust the trial schedule, and once he had adjourned so that one juror, the Pan American flight attendant, could run in the New York Marathon. During most weeks they served four days, going to their regular jobs on Friday, which the attorneys needed to prepare witnesses and other aspects of the case. Two of the jurors encountered resentment from their civil service bosses at the amount of time lost from work—a conflict of democratic values—and the judge had conveyed warnings that to hinder a juror from his or her duty was to risk a citation for contempt of court.

  But if the jurors had indeed endured with cheerful camaraderie two years of hardship and frequent tedium, acting as an exemplary enclave of ethnic and racial harmony, their ability to come to a unanimous decision on Angelo Buono was still in doubt. Judge George wondered whether the extent of the testimony— the transcript, prepared daily by two court reporters and three typists who usually worked until after eight in the evening, had now passed fifty thousand pages—and the complexity of considering ten separate murder counts would be overwhelming to twelve citizens who, however conscientious, were of varying degrees of intelligence and education. The judge’s belief in the jury system was absolute, but no one could deny that this trial would put that system to the severest test imaginable. What would happen, moreover, if during the deliberations one of the jurors fell ill or even dropped dead? By law one of the alternates would have to be brought in, with deliberations begun again from the beginning. A hung jury was always a possibility: Bob Grogan in his gloomier moments thought it a probability. To end up with no verdict after all this time and money spent—the costs to the county alone already approached two million dollars—would render the trial one of the great fiascos of legal history.

  Considering all of these factors, the judge determined that he would be prepared to have the jury announce a verdict on any single count as soon as agreement could be reached on it. The verdicts, in other words, could come in piecemeal. If the jurors could achieve unanimity on just one count, they could then return to deliberate on the remaining counts. The procedure was unusual but not unique, as Judge George was careful to establish. The defense, of course, strongly objected, sensing accurately that it would be far easier for the jury to agree on one count at a time than on ten together, but the judge stood his ground, citing legal precedents.

  Jury deliberations began on Friday, October 21. Saturday passed with no verdict, Sunday was a day off. No one had expected a quick verdict, but when a week had gone by without a decision on any count, Boren and Nash began to feel some apprehension, Chaleff and Mader some optimism. By the end of the week the jury began asking to reexamine certain exhibits and to have certain passages of testimony read back to them: they were not permitted to read the transcript itself, which contained far more than they were allowed to know. When the jury began asking for material relevant to later counts—Cepeda and Johnson, Lauren Wagner—it was clear that they had been unable to agree on one of the strongest counts, number two, Judy Miller. Salerno wondered whether his discovery of the fiber and of Markust Camden would go for naught. Had the defense been successful in impugning Camden? How could the jury ignore the fiber? The defense had argued that Bianchi could have used material from the Trim Shop without Angelo’s knowledge, but did anyone actually believe that? Could anyone possibly accept the defense’s contention that because Bianchi had killed two women on his own in Bellingham he had killed ten on his own in Los Angeles? As the prosecution had countered, the depth of the ligature marks on the Bellingham girls’ necks indicated that a different, more abrupt and furious kind of strangulation had taken place up there, the victims murdered quickly without even having been undressed first. And the carelessness with which the Bellingham bodies had been disposed of, the clues Bianchi had left, the ease with which he had been caught—all these factors pointed to the absence of Buono’s cold-blooded meticulousness and to the absurdity of imagining that Bianchi could have achieved the Hillside murders on his own.

  Grogan, who had little faith in juries anyway, grew anguished and sullen when it became clear that the jury had failed to agree on any of the first seven counts, had passed Kristina Weckler and were now considering Lauren Wagner. If they couldn’t agree on Lauren, Grogan thought, with the fibers and Beulah Stofer to go on, Angelo would walk. The Wagners, Grogan knew, had already begun discussing whether they could or would kill Angelo themselves if he was acquitted.

  Inside the jury room there had been trouble from the start of deliberations.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was a matter of ego. The jury’s first act was to elect a foreman. They chose Edward McKay, a black man, but the vote was not unanimous. Another male juror, not black, who for the sake of his and his descendants’ pride shall herein be known as Mr. Smith, had hoped to be elected, had for some reason assumed that he would be elected foreman. When he failed in this ambition, which in relation to the magnitude of the jury’s task seemed to others trivial but was anything but trivial to Mr. Smith, he grew resentful, sullen, angry, and, at length, recalcitrant. He would show the others what a mistake they had made in rejecting him.

  Ironically Mr. Smith had been one juror whom the prosecutors had been delighted to see impaneled two years before. He had been eager to serve and had brought with him letters from his employer describing him as a “solid citizen” type, and his answers during juror examination seemed to mark him as a law-and-order man. But, unknown to anyone but his fellow jurors, as the trial dragged on he had grown restless and irritable and was heard, as the trial adjourned for a weekend, to boast, “Well, you won’t be seeing me on Monday! I’ve had enough! See you suckers sometime!” Now that his fellow jurors had shown their lack of appreciation for his leadership potential, he would get back at them. He had the power to foul things up, and he would express his resentment by using that power. To hell with the others. To hell with The People v. Angelo Buono.

  Such egocentricity was no more rare among jurors than among the rest of humanity. Only the previous year a juror in a child pornography trial in Los Angeles had announced at the outset of deliberations that he hated the police, would rather die than give the police a victory, and would vote for acquittal no matter what the evidence and no matter what anyone else thought. He had pulled a chair into a comer of the jury room, opened a book, and refused to participate in the discussion. In the end the jury had deadlocked hopelessly at eleven to one. More common were problems with sequestered juries. Alliances often formed that had nothing to do with the case at hand. One Los Angeles bailiff told of how a woman juror had become attached to him and refused to cast her vote until he agreed to go to bed with her. When a jury was sequestered for more than a few days, romances often sprang up during the night at the hotel, affecting rational discussion the next morning. A bailiff would be asked to supply birth-control pills. Another Los Angeles bailiff recalled a romance between jurors that caused a divorce. Three days after the verdict had been reached, the lonely husband of a smitten juror telephoned to ask how much longer this trial was going to last. He missed his wife. The bailiff had to tell him that the jurors had been sent home days ago.

  Mr. Smith dug in. On count number one his attitude was relatively inconspicuous. Five of the jurors were convinced from the start that Angelo was guilty on all ten counts, but only these five voted for conviction on Yolanda Washington, which everyone agreed was the count offering th
e least evidence implicating Buono: here there were only Bianchi’s word and testimony about Yolanda’s connection to the bad trick list. When the jury passed on to consider Judy Miller, Mr. Smith got the chance to throw around the weight of his pique.

  After taking into consideration the Judy Miller fiber and Markust Camden’s testimony, together with the proximity of Melinda Hooper’s house to the body site, the jurors voted on this count eleven to one for conviction. It was then Tuesday, October 25. They had been out only four days and they were already that close to a verdict. But now Mr. Smith was showing the others where he stood. They were in his power. They would have to sit there indefinitely because of his not-guilty vote.

  Others pressed him. Discussion grew angry. Two especially articulate female jurors let Mr. Smith know what they thought of him. Foreman McKay tried to calm things down. Finally, under the pressure of being a minority of one, Mr. Smith caved in. He would vote, reluctantly, he said, for conviction. The jury was at last unanimous, and Foreman McKay prepared to fill out the verdict form and signal that a verdict was ready.

  But then everything fell apart again. A female juror sympathetic to Mr. Smith announced that she felt he had been pressured into his vote. She did not think it was right for him to vote against whatever he truly believed, so, as a gesture of kindness to Mr. Smith, she was changing her vote to not guilty. No one could fathom the motive of this bizarre act of self-abnegation. Could it be that she felt indebted to Mr. Smith because he had been the only one to give her a birthday present the night before? Was this a group therapy session?

  Mr. Smith, rejoicing in an ally, quickly changed his vote to not guilty. Foreman McKay, perhaps trying to mollify hurt feelings now in the hope of future agreement, changed his vote to not guilty, too. In a matter of seconds the vote had gone from twelve to nothing to nine to three. Discussion passed on to Lissa Kastin.