Police found even more photographs around the house, along with more written records, and a wallet with a man’s name in it that was not Berdella’s – it turned out to belong to a missing person. Newspaper articles about another missing man were discovered on a table. Even worse, a fresh area of cement had been poured in the basement’s concrete floor. By this time, Berdella had been arrested on suspicion of murder. Inside a cupboard, officers found a bag containing human vertebrae. All around the house, they found pieces of paper on which the names of men were written, as well as a man’s passport. A thorough police check showed that Berdella had been investigated in 1985, three years earlier, over the disappearance of two young men: Jerry Howell, 19, who went missing in July 1984, and James Ferris, 25, who vanished in September 1985, after Berdella had been seen with both men before their disappearances.
In order to detain Berdella while they continued to search, the police charged him with nine holding charges with regard to Bryson. He was not granted bail. The forensic search then focused on Berdella’s back yard, especially when it appeared that one area had recently been dug up. On opening up the ground, they found a human head with tissue and hair still clinging to it, as well as a vertebra. It became of prime importance to ascertain whether the skull had belonged to any of the men whose names and possessions had been found in the house, or other men who had been reported missing. A chainsaw seized from the house was taken for analysis. The analysts found traces of human blood, hair and flesh. They unearthed more vertebrae but no other bones.
Forensic tests on the skulls revealed that both belonged to specific men whose presence in Berdella’s house could be proven by other means – items that belonged to them, logs of what Berdella had done to them in which he had sometimes written names, and photographs. One skull was that of a young man named Robert Sheldon. The skull found in the ground was identified as having belonged to Larry Pearson.
As a result, Berdella was charged with Pearson’s murder, and in a bid to avoid the death penalty, Berdella pleaded guilty to killing him. Prosecutors were caught off-guard, but they decided to accept this. At that time, the second skull had not yet been identified. They hoped they could bring more charges later. Berdella admitted that he had killed Larry Pearson by asphyxiation. He had placed a plastic bag over his head, secured it with a rope and let him die. He acknowledged that he had been aware of what he was doing and that it was wrong.
The judge deferred judgment at this time. In the meantime, police had been able to identify the body of Sheldon using dental records. This time, prosecutors were ready for his defence team’s tactics. They notified the court in advance that they were seeking the death penalty, while Berdella indicated his intention to plead not guilty. Berdella’s attorneys offered a deal: Berdella would make a full confession, giving detectives the details of his sadistic crimes and naming names, in exchange for life in prison and for the police dropping their efforts to seize his house. Prosecutors decided to accept the deal and preparations were made to record everything that Berdella revealed. In a small conference room in the basement of the Kansas City jail, under oath, Berdella described what he had done; the confession took up 717 pages. His said his crime spree had begun four years earlier in 1984. All the victims had been abused and all had died inside his house.
The first victim was Jerry Howell; they’d had a sexual relationship for a couple of months. Berdella picked Howell up on the evening of 4 July and took him home, where he fed the young man a variety of tranquillisers. When Howell passed out, Berdella buggered him repeatedly. He used a carrot or cucumber to continue to assault him and then bound him to keep him at the house. Berdella went to work and returned that evening to repeat the assault. He injected Howell with several substances to keep him subdued and beat him with a metal rod. At about 10pm, Howell died. Berdella claimed that this had surprised him. He had not expected this turn of events and he figured that Howell must have accidentally inhaled his own vomit, as a result of the drug consumption. Berdella knew he had to get rid of the body but before he could dismember it he had to drain out the blood. He hung the body upside down by the feet. Then he took it down and used kitchen knives to cut it into manageable pieces. For some parts, he used his chainsaw. To dispose of Howell, he placed the pieces in bags. He then casually left the bags outside for the dustman to take away.
The next victim was Robert Sheldon, who had stayed at Berdella’s house several times. On 10 April 1985, he was taken captive by Berdella, who subjected him to the same atrocities to which he had subjected Howell. However, this time Berdella added something – an injection of Drano (drain cleaning fluid) into the left eye. The idea was to permanently blind Sheldon to make him a more manageable captive. Berdella also mutilated Sheldon’s hands with various implements. At one point, a visitor came to the house and, fearing that Sheldon might be heard, Berdella put a bag over his head and suffocated him, ending his four days of torture. Berdella cut Sheldon up in the bath and put the pieces out with the rubbish yet again. He kept the head in a freezer for a few days and then buried it in his back yard.
Two months passed before Berdella killed again. His victim this time was Mark Wallace, who was killed quickly after being given electric shock torture. In September, Walter Ferris was imprisoned and, after being injected and tortured, also died. His body, like the others before him, was cut up into pieces and put out with the rubbish for the dustman. The last murder victim was Larry Pearson, a male prostitute, whom Berdella said he had met in spring 1987. He held Pearson captive towards the end of June. Pearson was more cooperative than the other men, so Berdella did not have to use as much pressure on him. Berdella said that he kept Pearson around as a sex slave for about six weeks. He even thought of putting the dog collar on him first, before he had used it on Bryson. But Pearson decided to try fighting back. Berdella knocked him out to subdue him, and he died. Berdella also kept Pearson’s head in the freezer. During his confession, he stated that he had dug up Sheldon’s head and replaced it in the ground with Pearson’s. Taking the skull inside, he had removed the teeth and placed the skull in the wardrobe.
On 19 December 1988, Berdella pleaded guilty to five more murders. To four of them, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, but for Robert Sheldon he accepted the charge of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. On 8 October 1992, Berdella died in prison of a heart attack. For his four years of crimes against other men, he had served just four years in prison.
ANGELO BUONO AND KENNETH BIANCHI, AKA THE HILLSIDE STRANGLERS
In October 1977, the city of Los Angeles was thrown into a state of panic following a series of unexplained murders of young women. The police dubbed the killer the Hillside Strangler, simply because the bodies of the murder victims were dumped on hillsides on the outskirts of LA.
On Sunday, 20 November 1977, police were called to see the body of a young naked girl, Kristina Weckler, a 20-year-old student who had been found in the hills between Glendale and Eagle Rock. There were ligature marks on her wrists, ankles and neck, blood was oozing from her rectum and there were bruises on her breasts. Police also noticed two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that would indicate she was a drug addict. The initial police reaction was that the girl had been murdered elsewhere and that whoever dumped the body must have known the area.
That same day, police were alerted to the bodies of two girls that had been found on the other side of the same hillside area. The girls were Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, both of whom had been missing for about a week from St Ignatius School. The bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition and were maggot-infested. Both girls had been strangled. They were last seen getting off a bus and going over to a large two-ton sedan truck to talk to someone seated in the passenger seat. If this vehicle were connected to the murders, it would confirm police suspicions that there could have been two killers, probably both men.
On 23 November, the body of Jane King, 28, was found, th
is time near the Golden State Freeway. Her maggot-infested body was estimated to have been there for some two weeks. She had been strangled like the others, but it was not clear whether she had been raped or not. She had gone missing on 8 November.
The killer or killers stuck again that same month on 29 November around Glendale’s Mount Washington area. The naked body of Lauren Wagner, an 18-year-old student, was found lying partially in the street. Her body bore the same ligature marks on her ankles, wrists and neck, which the police had come to associate with the aptly named Hillside Strangler. However, there were other aspects of the murder that officers had not seen in the previous murders. They noticed that she had burns on her hands. There was also something else that was different, a shiny trace of some sticky substance. If this substance was semen or saliva, there was the possibility that the killer’s blood group could be determined. Tests on semen found in the earlier victims had revealed nothing.
The police came up with an eye-witness to Lauren’s abduction. The middle-aged female witness lived in the house next to which Lauren’s car had been parked and had seen Lauren pull over to the kerb at around 9pm. Two men had pulled up in a car alongside her. There was some kind of disagreement and Lauren ended up in the car with the two men. The witness described the men’s car as large and dark with a white top. One of the men had dragged Lauren from her car into his. She heard Lauren cry out, ‘You won’t get away with this!’ The witness described the men: one was tall and young with acne scars; the other one was Latin-looking, older and shorter with bushy hair. She was certain that she would be able to identify them again. The police were a little unsure about what the witness told them. The descriptions and overheard conversation seemed too good to be true considering the distance she had been from the abduction. However, this female witness was now terrified – prior to the police arriving to talk to her, she had received a mysterious phone call from a man with a New York accent who, in no uncertain terms, told her to keep quiet about what she had seen.
By now, the police had formed an elite taskforce and it looked closely at other similar murders that had occurred before this series. On 17 October 1977, a prostitute called Yolanda Washington had been raped and strangled. Her naked body had been dumped near the Forest Lawn cemetery.
On 31 October, the naked body of a woman was found on the roadside. Bruises on her neck showed that she had been strangled. Police found marks on her wrists and ankles as well as her neck. Her body had started to decompose. On one of her eyelids was a small piece of light-coloured fluff that forensic experts seized. It did not appear that she had been murdered where the body was found. The police had great difficulty in trying to identify the body. They believed it to be that of a young prostitute, Judy Miller. A witness said he had seen Judy Miller leave the Fish and Chips restaurant at 9pm on the evening before she was found dead.
A week later, on the morning of Sunday, 6 November 1977, the naked body of Lisa Kastin, 21, a waitress who worked at the Healthfair restaurant near Hollywood and Vine, was found. Lisa had last been seen leaving the Healthfair restaurant just after 9pm on the night she was murdered. She had been strangled and there was evidence of rape, but not buggery.
In mid-December, police were called to a steep hillside on Alvarado Street where they found the body of Kimberly Diane Martin, another prostitute working under the cover of a modelling agency. Kimberly Martin’s last client had directed her to apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind, which turned out to be vacant. The murderer’s call was traced to a pay phone in the lobby of the Hollywood public library.
No more murders occurred until 16 February 1978, when 20-year-old Cindy Hudspeth was murdered. Her strangled and brutalised body was found in the boot of her car, which had been pushed off a cliff. The murder had all the hallmarks of the previous killings, and the police now had a lead. Cindy lived in the same area of Glendale as one of the other victims, Kristina Weckler. The police believed that the killer or killers might live in the same area. This, however, was the only lead they had to pursue – and then, all of a sudden, the murders ceased.
It was not until December 1979 that the police had to dust the files down and review them all once more. On 12 January 1979, the police in Bellingham, Washington, were told that two female students were missing. The two room-mates, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were not the type of people to take off irresponsibly without telling anyone, so when Karen didn’t show up for work, her boss became worried. He remembered that she had accepted a house-sitting job in a very wealthy bayside neighbourhood from a security-guard friend of hers. Police contacted the security firm, which in turn called the security guard to ask him about the supposed house-sitting job for one of the company’s clients. The security guard claimed he knew nothing about it and had never heard of the two missing women. The security guard had told his employer that he had been at a sheriff’s reserve meeting the night the two women disappeared.
When police found out that the security guard had not been at the sheriff’s reserve meeting as he had told his employer, they decided to contact the security guard directly. They found him to be a friendly young man who had missed the sheriff’s meeting because it was about first aid, a subject with which he was familiar. At that time, they had no cause to disbelieve the man, as all they had were two missing persons. It wasn’t long before the missing girls both turned up dead. Their bodies were found inside an abandoned car in some woods. Both had been strangled. Other bruises suggested that they had been subjected to savage assaults. A full forensic examination was carried out.
Police decided to arrest the security guard, a man named Kenneth Bianchi (b. 1955). They wanted to try to keep him in custody while awaiting the forensic results. This was made easy as stolen property from sites he had been guarding was found at his house. They also ascertained from Los Angeles that Bianchi had resided in the Glendale area at the time of the murders there. Jewellery found in Bianchi’s home matched the description of jewellery that was worn by two of the victims: Kimberly Martin’s ram’s horn necklace and Olanda Washington’s turquoise ring. They now believed they had either the killer or one of the killers responsible for the Los Angeles stranglings. Police also discovered that Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono (b. 1934), who still resided in Los Angeles, had both come to the notice of police in Los Angeles for incidents involving young girls, where they had been impersonating police officers and trying to entice young girls into their car. They suspected that Buono might be the second killer.
While Bianchi languished in custody, he hatched a cunning defence plan. He would try to convince the authorities that he was suffering from a personality disorder and therefore insane. There followed protracted discussions between the defence and the prosecution with regard to the issue of insanity. The prosecution would not accept this plea. The outcome was that a deal was offered to Bianchi. If he pleaded guilty to the Ashington murders and to some of the Hillside Strangler murders, he would get life with the possibility of parole and he would be allowed to serve his sentence in California, where the prisons were supposedly more bearable than in Washington. In return, Bianchi was to agree to testify against Angelo Buono. He agreed.
Bianchi was then questioned at length about the murders and the involvement of Angelo Buono. Bianchi told officers that he and Angelo had pretended to be policemen, with fake police badges. Most of the victims were prostitutes, so it had been easy to convince them to get into the car. The hillside areas used to dispose of the victims were used because Buono knew them well. An important moment in the interview came when Bianchi was asked what type of material had been used to blindfold Judy Miller. Kenneth thought that it was foam that Angelo used in his car upholstery business. The little piece of fluff that forensic experts had found on the dead girl’s eyelid could be just the kind of corroborating evidence they needed to convict Buono. Police had been puzzled by the murder of Kristina Weckler, but Bianchi told them the grisly story. He described how she was brought out to the kitchen and put on the floor, th
en her head was covered with a bag. A pipe from the new stove, which wasn’t yet fully installed, was disconnected, put into the bag and then turned on. There may have been marks on her neck because a cord was put around it with a bag and tied to make a more complete seal. It took about an hour and a half of suffering before she died of asphyxiation.
Bianchi was finally brought to trial and sentenced to two life sentences in the state of Washington. He was immediately transferred to California, where he was sentenced to additional life terms. He would serve 35 years in Californian prisons and additional time in Washington.
Angelo Buono was finally arrested on 22 October 1979. Police found his wallet, which clearly showed the outline of the police badge. However, things were not going well for the police. Bianchi by this time had started to change his story; he realised that the prisoners had a code of conduct that they should not inform on each other. Rough justice could be dealt out if these rules were broken. But Bianchi also had another plan, which he hoped might secure his freedom.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 14