Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

  And on: King, Cepeda, Johnson, Weckler. The tally varied on each, but Mr. Smith, emboldened by sympathy, voted for acquittal on all. He was like a stone sitting in the middle of a stream, troubling discussion whenever it approached a level flow. The articulate women grew shrill, then agreed between themselves to temper their ire. They could recognize disturbed male egos when they saw them, and they feared pushing other males over to Mr. Smith’s side. The second Sunday arrived. Bailiffs escorted jurors on a tour of an arboretum, an excursion designed to keep them from going stir-crazy.

  The courtroom meanwhile was for the most part deserted. Judge George worked on other matters in his chambers, where the model of Angelo’s house and the pictures of the victims still rested, trying to distract himself while the jury debated in their room two doors down the hall. On one quiet day Roger Boren and Michael Nash encountered Katherine Mader in the building. They exchanged pleasantries and speculated about when the jury would finally report. Then Mader, chattering in her usual cheerful way, made a series of revelations that startled the prosecutors. Rather in the spirit of “I know something you don’t know,” she told them that the defense had known about several things that would have been highly useful to the prosecution, but it was too late for them now, so she would tell them.

  The defense knew where the Excalibur was, she said, stored in a garage in Glendale. And it would have been useful had the prosecution known, as the defense did, that Angelo’s mother had died of vaginal cancer, specifically. Didn’t they think that this provided an extra deep psychological motive for Buono to kill women? And one more thing. The hairs on Lauren Wagner’s hands, found mixed in with the fibers from the carpet and chair, were not cat hairs, as everyone had thought, but rabbit fur—another link to Angelo. Too bad Boren and Nash had missed all that! If the jury had been told about one or two of these things, they might not be taking so long.

  Boren and Nash could not recall in their experience a defense attorney making revelations, confessions really, such as these after a trial—certainly not while the jury was still out, with a retrial always a possibility should the deliberations result in a hung jury. Oh well, Nash observed, it was not the first bizarre incident in this case. It was fitting, in its way.

  Halloween again, the sixth anniversary of the discovery of Judy Miller’s body. Just after lunch a buzzer sounded three times in the courtroom: the signal that the jury had reached a verdict after nine days. The judge had his clerk inform the media that the jury’s decision would be announced at four o’clock. Radio and television stations began broadcasting the impending event on the half-hour. By four the courtroom had filled with reporters, the detectives, and the few spectators who could get in. Absent were any friends or relatives of Angelo Buono: none had appeared at any time during the trial, except to testify. Grogan, standing near the back with the other detectives, was experiencing what Dr. Watkins might have diagnosed as dissociative reaction: he had invited friends over to his apartment that night to watch Monday Night Football, and he kept inquiring aloud of no one in particular, ‘‘I’m having all these people over. What am I going to do? What’ll I do with all the Chinese food I ordered?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Judge George began the ritual, “I am informed by the bailiff that you have arrived at a verdict. I would inquire of the foreman, Mr. McKay, whether this is in fact the case.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  McKay then handed the verdict form to Jerry Cunningham, who handed it to the judge, who opened the envelope and read the verdict silently. The judge seemed to take a long time to read the few words. It was like a moment of ominous quiet in the middle of a thunderstorm. He handed the form to the clerk, and she, hands shaking, read it out:

  “ ‘We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant Angelo Buono guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner in violation of Section 187, Penal Code, a felony, as charged in Count Eight of the Information and we further find it to be murder in the first degree. This 31st day of October, 1983. Edward McKay, Foreman.’ ”

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict, so say you one, so say you all?”

  The jury intoned a collective yes.

  Judge George, with characteristic scrupulosity, asked the clerk to poll the jurors individually, a step usually taken only at the request of the defense or prosecution. It was an act as final as the last out in the ninth inning; after it no juror could change his or her vote. Mr. Smith’s turn to be polled came more than halfway through. Head low, he mumbled an affirmative like a man whose judgment was being extracted from him with forceps, as Michael Nash noted, wondering whether Mr. Smith was ill and thinking that he would have to ask the jurors after the trial whether something had been wrong with Smith. As Nash eventually learned, after nine days Smith had caved in, the evidence on the Lauren Wagner count being greater even than his pride.

  The judge told the jury to resume their deliberations on the other counts in the morning, and he advised them not to be affected by the presence of so large a number of reporters and photographers in the courtroom. He had noticed, as had Boren and Nash, that the jury had registered shock at the mass of media people who had come to record the verdict: the jurors had looked rather like prisoners who, suddenly released from darkness, felt bombarded by harsh worldly light. Grogan too had noticed the jurors’ seeming surprise at their public importance. Grogan figured that at least some of them had achieved, as he said, the courage of conviction only by ignoring the social impact of a unanimous verdict. “Sometimes a horse needs blinders to win,” was the way Grogan phrased it.

  Grogan’s first act after the verdict was to rush to telephone the Wagners, who had moved to Oregon, and the Wecklers, who had moved to Hawaii. Salerno reached Cindy Hudspeth’s mother, and the other detectives telephoned most of the remaining families. Sabra Hannan, who had heard the news on Phoenix television, managed to get through to Roger Boren at his courthouse office, telling him how much she appreciated the work he and Nash had done. Because of them, she said, she could now go on with her new life. She would never forget her ordeal, but she could at least have faith in people and the courts again.

  Then the detectives gathered with Boren and Nash at the Code 7 bar. The name of the bar had never seemed so appropriate: it was a play on police code, 4 being the gravest emergency, an officer in distress, 7 a fantasy number suggesting that a situation so extreme had arisen that the only possible response was drink. At the Code 7 that afternoon the mood was less celebration than purgation. Boren and Nash felt less triumphant than relieved and bemused: since Van de Kamp’s election as attorney general, the prosecutors had worked the case on their own without encouragement or advice from their superiors, as though as prosecutors they had not been tied to an official state office. Attorney General Van de Kamp had not telephoned to congratulate them, nor were they optimistic about their futures under his stewardship. By the second drink, emotions cracked open and the gruffest of all, Grogan, who was especially moved because the first guilty verdict had come on Lauren Wagner, began to weep. As he had said to a Herald-Examiner reporter, who Put the quote on the front page the next day, “The man who killed Lauren Wagner deserves to die.” Grogan strode around the bar hugging people, his emotions melting everyone’s reserve, tears Niagarous. He grabbed Michael Nash, roaring, “My little imp, you did it, Mikey, you and Roger, my little imp!” Then Grogan proposed a toast to Judge George:

  “To the greatest judge in the state. He’s the real hero. He kept it going. Thank God for Judge George.”

  The next morning, after a long night at his apartment during which nobody talked football, Grogan awoke thinking about the judge again. He would have to do something to honor him. He decided to arrange a high-dollar lunch at the Tower Restaurant. He would pick the judge up in a police helicopter, landing on the roof of the courthouse, and fly him over to the restaurant, which was on the top floor of a skyscraper a few blocks away. Everyone would be there, Salerno and Finnigan, Boren a
nd Nash, Chief Gates; and Grogan’s friend the maître d’ would lay on snails and veal and the best wines. The lunch would take place after the rest of the verdicts and the sentencing were all over. Lying in bed, Grogan started composing the speech he would make. But all that would be weeks away. He wanted to do something for the judge right now. A compulsion seized Grogan.

  He quickly showered and dressed and drove to the liquor store. It was ten in the morning. The judge would be in his chambers. Grogan bought a bottle of chilled Dom Pérignon and two wineglasses and raced to the courthouse, hiding the sack under his suitcoat. He hurried through the empty courtroom into the hallway behind and burst into chambers, pulling out the champagne and waving it aloft:

  “Goddammit, Judge George”—pronounced Ge-aaawge—” ‘let’s have a drink! I got to congratulate you.”

  Grogan set the glasses down on the judge’s desk and began struggling with the wire on the cork, slicing his finger.

  The judge leaned far back in his chair, looking as though a wild animal had just broken in through the window. His mouth fell open, but he was unable to speak as Grogan twisted at the cork with bloody fingers, let it pop and hit the ceiling, and started pouring, drops of blood falling onto the desk.

  “No, no, Sergeant Grogan,” he finally got out. “Please, don’t do that. Think, sergeant, think! This wouldn’t be right. Really, I appreciate how you feel. I know what you’ve been through, but please take the champagne away. My God, the jury’s just down the hall!”

  At first Grogan looked hurt, but then, downing both glasses, he said he just wanted to let the judge know how he felt:

  “Judge, it’s a resurrection of faith.”

  And Grogan left, finishing off the champagne in the elevator.

  On Thursday, November 3, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on the Yolanda Washington charge, but immediately afterward they asked to see the Judy Miller fiber evidence again. Gerald Chaleff expressed satisfaction to the press at the not-guilty verdict, saying that it bespoke a jury capable of making up their own minds. On Friday, Katherine Mader waited around the courtroom wearing shorts and a T -shirt with the words ‘‘I’d rather be in Rochester” printed on the front. On Saturday, the jury brought in a guilty verdict on the Judy Miller count, which made Salerno feel that his efforts had not been wasted and that his integrity had been once again vindicated, and found “special circumstances” tying the Wagner and Miller killings together as multiple murders. This meant, under a recent California law passed in response to the public’s outrage that killers such as Charles Manson and Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, were eligible for parole, that Angelo Buono must be sentenced either to death or to a minimum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

  On Monday morning the jury returned guilty verdicts on Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, again with special circumstances applying. Dudley Varney became very emotional at this and had to leave the courtroom: the two girls had been his special charge. On this day Angelo, his pachydermal sensitivities finally affected, refused to put on civilian clothes and appeared in court wearing jailhouse blues, his tattoos revealed. He announced that he was firing Chaleff and Mader. That afternoon he was found guilty on the Kimberly Martin count. “I am no longer speaking to Mr. Chaleff,” he told the judge.

  Two days later the jury brought in guilty verdicts on Kristina Weckler, Lissa Kastin, and Jane King. That left only Cindy Hudspeth, but after another two days, Foreman McKay told the judge that the jury were “hopelessly deadlocked” on this last count, eleven to one. The judge instructed the jury to resume deliberations, but on the way to the hotel a woman juror suffered chest pains and was taken to the hospital. Deliberations would be suspended until she was released, or else an alternate would have to be brought in and discussion started over on the Hudspeth count. Media commentators noted that her sudden illness would silence any remaining criticism of the judge’s decision to have each verdict reported separately. At least nine counts were already safely delivered.

  This time the stubborn juror was not Mr. Smith but his former female ally, the woman who had originally changed her vote on Judy Miller out of sympathy for Mr. Smith. The question here was whether the evidence showed that two men must have been involved in the dumping of Cindy Hudspeth’s body miles up the Angeles Crest Highway, and everyone except this lone woman believed that there must have been two men, one following in a second car for the return trip. She argued that Kenneth Bianchi must have taken a bicycle along and had ridden down the mountain on it. To the other jurors’ protests that no mention of any bicycle had ever entered anyone’s mind before this, that not even the defense had suggested that Bianchi so much as owned a bicycle, she answered that she was entitled to her own opinion.

  Finally on Monday, November 14, the ill juror recovered and the holdout changed her vote to guilty on Cindy Hudspeth. In all by this time the jury had noted seventy-two special circumstances tying the murders in together, so there was no question that the most lenient sentence Angelo could get would be life without parole.

  All the time that the jury had been deliberating, Gerald Chaleff had not been idle. He continued to look for every possible means to argue for a mistrial, and he made two such motions, one saying that the jury had viewed a television movie prejudicial to their opinions of Angelo and the other almost metaphysical in concept. The movie was called Chiefs. It was set in a small Southern town, and the plot involved a corrupt white police officer, a noble black chief, and a murderous former chief, white, who killed young boys and buried them under his front yard. How seeing this movie could possibly have prejudiced the jury against Angelo neither the bailiff, who had permitted them to watch, nor the judge could imagine. The judge dismissed this motion, commenting that Chaleff’s fears about the jury’s exposure to this television program certainly stood in contrast to his earlier opposition to sequestering the jury.

  The other motion came when the jury asked to see the big plasterboard with all the pictures of the victims on it. Chaleff argued that while the individual photographs had each been admitted to evidence, the board to which they were glued had not been formally admitted and that therefore the jury ought not to have been permitted to look at the pictures as they appeared lined up on the board. When Chaleff suggested that as a compromise the board be cut into ten separate strips, the judge said that this sort of discussion reminded him of medieval scholastic philosophy—he was about to ask Chaleff whether he thought that the board should be sliced up with William of Ockham’s razor but decided the reference was too arcane—and directed that the board remain intact.

  Judge George also denied Angelo’s motion to represent himself during the penalty phase of the trial, when the jury would determine whether to fix the punishment at death. Angelo failed to appreciate all that Gerald Chaleff was trying to do for him, and the judge questioned Buono whether he was planning to ask for the death penalty so the state could “help you commit suicide.”

  “Ain’t part of my motivation,” Angelo replied.

  “If you had a medical problem,” the judge told him in a hearing held in chambers, “the way you did with your tooth, you wouldn’t have pulled your tooth out. You sought a professional dentist. And when you are in a court of law, I think it is equally absurd to try to represent yourself, especially on the question of whether you should live or die.” Had the judge known of the circumstances under which Angelo’s tooth had been pulled, he might have chosen a different analogy. He concluded that “even a multimillionaire” could not have had a better defense and ruled that the danger of erroneously imposing a death sentence outweighed the minor infringement of Buono’s asserted right to represent himself after two years in court.

  But Angelo remained defiant. On November 16 he took the stand for the first and only time, as a gesture of contempt for the court, for the law, for ten dead women and their families. Chaleff asked him whether he would like to tell the jury what punishment he felt he should receive, and Angelo replied, re
gaining his old cockiness:

  “My morals and constitutional rights has been broken.”

  The meaning was elusive but ultimately clear: he was thumbing his nose at everyone. The judge asked him to speak up.

  “My morals and constitutional rights has been broken,” Angelo repeated. “I ain’t taking any procedure in this trial.”

  Chaleff asked him to clarify his response.

  “I stand mute,” Angelo said, and when the judge asked him if he had anything further to say, he added, “I am standing mute to anything further.”

  It was not easy, during the penalty phase, for the defense to find character witnesses for Angelo. His daughter Grace, loyal to the end, wanted to testify for him, but Angelo, talking to her alone in the judge’s chambers (“a conjugal visit,” Grogan called it), convinced her to keep silent. His sister Cecilia said that her brother could never commit murder, and a man who said he had known Angelo Buono for years assured the jury that Buono “wouldn’t hurt a canary bird.” He had once asked Angelo to do something illegal, and Angelo had refused.

  “What did you ask him to do?” Michael Nash inquired.

  “I asked him to burn down a guy’s house. He wouldn’t do it.”

  The witness was excused.

  In the closing arguments of the penalty phase, each attorney had the opportunity to plead for mercy or for death to Buono. Michael Nash took this chance to remind the jurors once again of the victims. He knew that although the trial had now been a way of life for the jurors for years, some of them might well by now be confused about the particular identities of the murdered women; and the penalty phase itself had concentrated so much on Angelo as an individual that the individuality of the victims might have been forgotten, as Bob Grogan had all along feared. Such indeed was what so often happened in a highly publicized murder trial, the killers becoming celebrities, their victims nonentities, remembered as alive only by their families and friends. Certainly it would have been a rare member of the public who could have named anything unique about any of the women. Casual discussions with random citizens indicated that most people believed that all of the victims had been prostitutes: it was easier to accept the crimes that way; it was less threatening.