by Colin Wilson
Grogan and Salerno could hardly believe their ears. It meant that even if Buono was convicted on the other charges, he would serve only about five years in jail.
The judge agreed to deliver his ruling on July 21, 1981. During the week preceding that date, morale among the police was at rock bottom; no one doubted that the judge would agree to drop the charges—after all, if the DA’s office was so unsure of a conviction, they must know what they were talking about.
On the day of the ruling, Buono looked cheerful and his junior counsel, Katherine Mader, was beaming with confidence. But as the judge reviewed the evidence, it became clear that their confidence was misplaced. Whether Bianchi was reliable or not, said the judge, the evidence of various witnesses, and the Judy Miller fiber evidence, made it clear that there was a strong case against Buono. Therefore, concluded Judge George, he was denying the district attorney’s motion. And if, he added, the DA showed any lack of enthusiasm in prosecuting Buono, he would refer the case to the attorney general.
Buono, who had expected to walk free from the courtroom, had to cancel his plans for a celebratory dinner with his lawyers.
At this point the DA’s office decided to withdraw from the case. Thereupon, the attorney general appointed two of his deputies, Roger Boren and Michael Nash, to prosecute Buono.
The trial, which lasted from November 1981 to November 1983, was the longest murder trial in American history. The prosecution called 251 witnesses and introduced more than a thousand exhibits. But although the transcript would eventually occupy hundreds of volumes, the trial itself held few surprises. It took until June 1982 to get to Bianchi’s evidence—he was the two-hundredth witness to testify—and he at first showed himself typically vague and ambiguous. But when the judge dropped a hint that he was violating his original plea-bargaining agreement, and that he would have to serve out his time in Washington’s Walla Walla—a notoriously tough jail—he became altogether less vague. Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the results were damning to his cousin.
The defense team raised many objections, and pursued a tactic of trying to discredit witnesses and evidence. On the submission that testimony obtained under hypnosis should be inadmissible, the judge ruled that Bianchi had been faking both hypnosis and multiple personality. More serious was a motion by the defense to dismiss the whole case because one of the prosecution witnesses—Judy Miller’s boyfriend—had been in a psychiatric hospital. This was also overruled: it was the defense’s fault, the judge said, for failing to spot the material in the files.
Finally, the defense called Veronica Compton, the “copycat slayer,” to try to prove that she and Bianchi had planned to “frame” Angelo Buono. Veronica, still seething with resentment, gave her evidence with histrionic relish. But when she admitted that she had once planned to open a mortuary so she and her lover could have sex with the corpses, it was clear that the jury found it hard to treat her as a reliable witness.
In the final submissions in October 1983, Buono’s defense lawyer Gerald Chaleff argued that Bianchi had committed the murders alone, and that his cousin was an innocent man. The judge had to rebuke him for implying that the whole case against his client was a conspiracy. The jury retired on October 21, 1983, and when they had spent a week in their deliberations, the defense began to feel gloomy and the prosecution correspondingly optimistic. It emerged later that one juror, who was resentful about not being chosen as foreman, had been consistently obstructive. But finally, on Halloween, the jury announced that it had found Angelo Buono guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner. During the following week they also found him guilty of murdering Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Jane King, Lissa Kastin, and Cindy Hudspeth. But—possibly influenced by the fact that Bianchi had already escaped the death penalty—they decided that Buono should not receive a death sentence. On January 4, 1984, the judge ordered that, since he had done everything in his power to sabotage the case against his cousin, Bianchi should be returned to serve his sentence in Washington. He then sentenced Buono to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, regretting that he could not sentence him to death. In his final remarks he told the defendants: “I am sure, Mr. Buono and Mr. Bianchi, that you will both probably only get your thrills reliving over and over again the torturing and murdering of your victims, being incapable, as I believe you to be, of feeling any remorse.”
Asked later whether such acts as Buono and Bianchi had committed did not prove them insane, he commented: “Why should we call someone insane simply because he or she chooses not to conform to our standards of civilized behavior?”
An interesting question remains: If the Behavioral Science Unit had been called in at the time of the rampage of Hillside murders in 1977, would there have been a chance of pinpointing the killers?
The answer is probably yes. The worldwide publicity brought the LAPD a communication from a private detective in Berlin. The name of this detective has not been recorded because Detective Grogan was unable to pronounce it, and instead referred to him as “Dr. Schickelgruber.” One day, he turned up, having flown to Los Angeles from Germany. He spoke no English, so a German-speaking detective was summoned. “Dr. Schickelgruber” than wrote (in German) on a blackboard:
Two Italians
(Brothers)
Aged about thirty-five.
The doctor was politely thanked, and was driven back to the airport. No one, says Darcy O’Brien in his book Two of a Kind, took him seriously.
But clearly, someone should have taken him seriously and asked his reasons.
More important, if a detective from Berlin could have recognized that the Stranglers were Italian and closely related, then presumably so could the Behavioral Science Unit. And if they could have got that far, a number of simple steps could have led them to the killers.
Grogan had recognized from fairly early in the Thanksgiving killing rampage that two men were involved. He reasoned this from the fact that when Kristina Weckler’s body was found on November 20, 1977, in an area between Glendale and Eagle Rock, there were no visible drag marks or disturbances in the foliage, which meant that the body must have been carried by at least two men. The same point became even clearer when the two schoolgirls were found.
On his way to Kristina Weckler’s body, Grogan had already noted that the killers must be familiar with the area. The question: “Why Kristina Weckler?”—a quiet art student living alone in an apartment building—could have led to the conclusion that the killer already knew the building, and a search of former tenants would have revealed Bianchi’s name. If they had been aware that their killers could be Italian, Bianchi and his cousin would have immediately become major suspects.
Unfortunately, no one thought of calling in the Behavioral Science Unit (it would have been technically possible because the two schoolgirls were kidnapped, making it a crime eligible for an FBI investigation), so these speculations must remain wishful thinking.
Angelo Buono was found dead of a heart attack in his cell at Calipatria State Prison in California on September 21, 2002; he was sixty-seven. Bianchi is serving his 118-year sentence at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State. Bianchi had been hoping to serve his time in California, rather than in the notoriously harsh Walla Walla, but his lack of cooperation ruined his chances. Subsequently, Bianchi filed a claim against Whatcomb County seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars for lost wages and emotional distress. He argues that police and prosecutors withheld crucial evidence, leading him to his original guilty plea in 1979. Now minus his thick, curly hair, he declared in an interview in February 2004 that he was withdrawing his guilty plea and insisting on his innocence.
10
The Turning Point
To law enforcement officials it must have seemed that serial murder arrived in the United States as suddenly and devastatingly as the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century—but was rather worse, for while the Black Death lasted for three years, from 1347 until 1350, there is
still no sign of an end to this “plague of murder.”
That analogy, however, makes things sound worse than they are. The Black Death wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, and continued to return down the centuries, killing millions. The “plague of murder” has caused a fractional increase in the crime rate, but already the fight against it is proving more successful than anyone could have foreseen in the mid-1970s.
For many years, not even the Behavioral Science Unit was aware of its success. In 1978, William Webster, head of the FBI, had given his official approval to allowing instructors such as Ressler and Hazelwood to offer police forces a psychological profiling service. But the FBI is a bureaucracy, and even by 1980, no one was sure if was justifying its cost. A questionnaire was sent out to all the officials and detectives who had used the service to solicit their opinion. If the answer had been negative, the BSU might have faded away. In fact, the replies demonstrated that, although many officials in the Bureau were dubious about this new departure, police themselves were full of enthusiasm. A 1981 report concluded: “The evaluation reveals that the program is actually more successful than any of us really realized. The Behavioral Science Unit is to be commended for their outstanding job.”
An earlier chapter has described how in 1974, the unit was able to identify David Meirhofer as the kidnapper of Susan Jaeger, and how, when the police chief in Platte City, Kansas, telephoned the unit to describe the circumstances of the murder of Julie Wittmeyer, the profiler was able to describe the killer so accurately that the police chief cried: “Sure as shootin’, it’s him!”
One of Roy Hazelwood’s first profiles in 1978 demonstrated the same impressive accuracy. In Saint Joseph, Missouri, a babysitter left four-year-old Eric Christgen alone in a playground while she ran to the store. When she returned, the child was missing. His sexually abused body was later found at the foot of cliffs above the river. When the local police had run out of leads, they decided to approach Quantico.
Working with crime-scene photographs and police reports, Hazelwood’s own experience of criminal pedophiles led him to surmise that the killer was a white male of around fifty. This was based on witnesses to the abduction. And a middle-aged pedophile who sodomizes and strangles a child almost certainly has a police record. From the roughness of the steep hillside where the man had taken the boy, Hazelwood reasoned that the killer was powerfully built.
He judged that the man was a laborer, since he would be unlikely to have the ability or skill to hold down a more demanding job. He added that the man was a loner who had probably been drinking all day, and that this was a crime of sudden impulse.
As a final comment Hazelwood said that the criminal pedophile, like the sexual sadist, is the only sexual offender who experiences no remorse or guilt. They enjoy committing their crimes, and they fantasize about them later.
A few months after the murder, Michael Reynolds, an unemployed twenty-five-year-old cook, broke down under interrogation and confessed to killing the child. It looked as if Hazelwood had been wide of the mark. But, in 1983, a pedophile named Charles Hatcher was arrested for another crime, and confessed to the murder of Eric Christgen, and to sixteen other murders over the years. He had been fifty at the time he killed Eric. Hatcher was sentenced to life, and Reynolds was released. (False confessions, based on deep guilt feelings, are one of the problems most policemen have to contend with at some time.) Hatcher hanged himself in his cell a year later.
The prosecutor, Michael Insco, who had been in charge of the Reynolds case, later admitted to Hazelwood that he had not read the profile, since at the time the work of the Behavioral Science Unit was little known. He had come across it after Hatcher’s conviction and realized that it matched on twenty-one points. If its accuracy had been recognized in 1978, Hatcher would have been prevented from killing again.
In 1979, the year Reynolds was falsely convicted, the Behavioral Science Unit had one of its most striking early successes.
Francine Elveson, twenty-six, a tiny four-foot-eleven-inches Plain Jane who suffered from a slight curvature of the spine, was found naked, badly beaten about the head and face, and with her body mutilated, spread-eagled on the roof of the Pelham Parkway Houses apartment building in the Bronx where she lived with her parents. So severe was the physical assault that her jaw and nose were both broken, and the teeth in her head pounded loose. Her nylon stockings were loosely tied round her wrists and ankles, even though no restraint had been needed: she was unconscious, or already dead, when that was done. Her underwear had been pulled over her head, hiding her battered features from view. There were tooth marks visible on her thighs and knees.
Using a pen taken from her handbag, her killer had scrawled a challenge to the police on one thigh: “You can’t stop me,” and on her stomach, “Fuck you.” Both the pen and the dead teacher’s umbrella were found thrust into her vagina, and her comb (also taken from the handbag) wedged in her pubic hair. Her pierced earrings had been removed from the lobes, and placed on either side of her head. Both breasts were mutilated, each nipple cut off and placed back on the chest.
There were no deep knife wounds: this suggested that the killer had used a small weapon—a penknife, probably—and taken it with him. A pendant that the victim habitually wore, manufactured in the shape of a Jewish good luck sign (chai), was missing—presumably taken by her assailant. The dead woman’s limbs were positioned to simulate the shape of the pendant, as if to form a replica.
Francine Elveson was attacked within minutes of leaving her parents’ apartment shortly after 6:30 a.m. on October 12, 1979. Her body was found on the roof some eight hours later, after she failed to arrive at the school for disabled children where she taught. The police report showed that the attack took place as she made her way downstairs. She was battered unconscious and carried up to the roof for the macabre ritual that followed. Medical evidence revealed that she had not been raped. The cause of death was strangulation; she had in fact been twice strangled, manually first and then with the strap of her handbag. Lack of forensic evidence—fragments of skin tissue, fibers, and the like—under her fingernails indicated that she had made no attempt to fight off her assailant. Traces of semen were found on her body, but DNA fingerprinting would not be discovered for another five years, so there were no apparent clues to the identity of her murderer.
Because of its bizarre features the Elveson case attracted a great deal of publicity, but despite an intensive police investigation that included questioning some two thousand people, and checking on known sex offenders and patients undergoing treatment in mental hospitals, the search for Francine Elveson’s killer bogged down. Finally, in November 1979, local authorities called in the FBI—even though the police investigators thought it was probably a waste of time. One experienced murder squad detective was quoted as saying: “Frankly I didn’t see where the FBI could tell us anything, but I figured there was no harm in trying.”
Crime-scene photographs, together with the police report and autopsy findings, were duly forwarded to the Behavioral Science Unit for analysis.
Enter Special Agent John Douglas to profile the type of person responsible—from his desk at Quantico, some three hundred miles away. He knew from the police report that Francine Elveson, who was self-conscious about her size and physical deformity, had no boyfriends. That ruled out a lovers’ quarrel. Moreover, it was spontaneous choice that led her to leave for work that morning via the stairs, rather than use the elevator. Those two factors meant that it was a chance encounter between victim and murderer—yet an encounter with someone who promptly spent a long time on the roof mauling his victim in broad daylight. To John Douglas that meant he was no stranger to the building; he knew its routine well enough to feel confident that he would not be disturbed during the ritual mutilation murder that ensued.
Again, the fact that he was in the building at that hour suggested someone who might live, or perhaps work there. And Elveson—this shy, almost reclusive young woman who shu
nned men because of her appearance—had neither screamed nor made any apparent attempt to ward off a man who suddenly lashed out as they passed on the stairs. It had to mean that either he was someone she knew, if only by sight, or who was wearing an identifiable uniform—postman, say, or janitor—whom she believed she had no reason to fear.
The offender left mixed crime scene characteristics, as many sex killers do. He used restraints (organized), yet left the body in full view (disorganized). He depersonalized his victim (disorganized), yet having mutilated her body took the knife with him (organized). On balance, however, John Douglas classified him as a “disorganized” offender, acting out a fantasy ritual that had probably been inspired earlier by a bondage article and/or sketches in some pornographic magazine. The FBI agent profiled him as white (Francine Elveson was white), male, of roughly her age (say between twenty-five and thirty-five), and of average appearance, in other words, who would not seem in any way out of character in the apartment building environment.
Statistics pointed to a school “dropout” type, possibly now unemployed. Because of the time at which it happened, the crime seemed unlikely to be either drink- or drug-related. Francine Elveson’s killer was a man who found it difficult to behave naturally with women, and was almost certainly sexually inadequate. (The ritual mutilation provided the gratification he craved—a fact borne out by forensic evidence, which revealed traces of semen on the body.) He was the type of sex offender who would keep a pornography collection, while his sadistic behavior pointed to one with mental problems.
He left the body in view because he wanted it to shock and offend. That decision was part and parcel of his implied challenge to the police, inked on the victim’s thigh—“You can’t stop me.” It was a challenge that John Douglas believed meant he was liable to kill again, should opportunity arise. His profile stressed the importance of the attacker’s prior knowledge of the apartment building where the victim lived—and her apparent lack of alarm as they met on the stairs.