The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  In the four months between 18 October 1977 and 17 February 1978 the naked bodies of ten girls were dumped on hillsides in the Los Angeles area. Newspapers christened the killer ‘the Hillside Strangler’. In fact, it was known to the police from an early stage that two men were involved; sperm inside the dead women revealed that one of the rapists was a ‘secretor’ (one whose blood group can be determined from his bodily fluids) and one a non-secretor.

  The first victim was a black prostitute named Yolanda Washington, who operated around Hollywood Boulevard. Her naked corpse was found in the Forest Lawn cemetery near Ventura Freeway; she had been strangled with a piece of cloth. Two weeks later, on 1 November 1977, fifteen-year-old Judy Miller, a runaway, was found in the town of La Crescenta, not far from the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. She had been raped vaginally and anally, then strangled, and marks on her wrists and ankles, and in the area of her mouth, indicated that she had been bound with adhesive tape. It was not until the last weeks of November, around Thanksgiving, that the police realised that they had an epidemic of sex murders on their hands; seven more strangled corpses were found, tossed casually on hillsides or by the road, as if thrown from a car. The youngest victims were two schoolgirls, aged twelve and fourteen; the oldest was a twenty-eight-year-old scientology student, Jane King. The last victim of the Thanksgiving ‘spree’ was eighteen-year-old Lauren Wagner, and burn marks on her palms suggested that she had been tortured before death.

  Los Angeles has about seven murders a day, but this number of sex murders in a few weeks was something of a record. Women became afraid to go out alone at night, and shops ran out of tear gas and Mace (similar to CS gas). By the time Lauren Wagner’s body was discovered, Los Angeles was in a state of panic.

  In this case, at least, they had an important clue. Lauren Wagner had been abducted as she climbed out of her car in front of her parents’ home. A neighbour had looked out of her window to see why her dog was barking, and had heard Lauren shout: ‘You won’t get away with this.’ She had then seen two men force the girl into a big dark sedan with a white top, and drive away. The woman had seen the men clearly; the elder of the two had bushy hair and was ‘Latin-looking’, while the younger one was taller, and had acne scars on his neck. The following day, her telephone rang, and a voice with a New York accent told her she had better keep quiet or she was as good as dead.

  If the police had grasped the significance of this phone call they could have terminated the career of the Hillside Stranglers forthwith, for the only way a man could have obtained a telephone number without knowing the name of the subscriber was through some friend at the telephone exchange. A check with the Los Angeles exchange would have revealed the identity of one of the stranglers . . .

  There would be two more victims. One was a seventeen-year-old prostitute named Kimberley Diane Martin; on 15 December 1977 her naked body was found sprawled on a vacant lot near City Hall. A man had telephoned a call-girl agency the evening before and requested a blonde in black underwear to be sent to the Tamarind Apartment building in Hollywood; Kimberley Martin was despatched, and disappeared.

  On 17 February 1978 someone reported seeing an orange car halfway down a cliff on the Angeles Crest Highway. The boot proved to contain another naked body, that of twenty-year-old Cindy Hudspeth, a student and part-time waitress; she had been raped and sodomised by two men. After this, the Hillside murders ceased.

  Almost a year later, on 12 January 1979, the police chief of Bellingham, a small coastal town in Washington State, was notified that two students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were missing. On the previous evening, Karen Mandic had told her boyfriend that she had been offered $100 by a security supervisor named Ken Bianchi to do a ‘house-sitting’ job – to spend an evening in an empty house while its security alarm was repaired.

  Bianchi was a personable young man from Los Angeles, and he had been in Bellingham since the previous May. He was known to be an affectionate husband and father, and a conscientious worker; it seemed unlikely that he had anything to do with the disappearance of the two girls. In fact, he denied knowing them. Later that day, the bodies of the girls were found in the rear seat of Karen Mandic’s car, parked in a cul-de-sac.

  Kenneth Bianchi was immediately picked up. His air of bewilderment seemed so genuine that the police were convinced they had the wrong man. His common-law wife Kelli Boyd, who had recently borne his child, was equally certain that Bianchi was incapable of murder. When Bianchi’s home was searched, and the police found stolen property in his basement, it became apparent that he was not as honest as everyone had assumed. Medical evidence left no doubt that he was the murderer. Both girls had semen stains on their underwear; so did Bianchi. Diane Wilder had been menstruating, and Bianchi had menstrual stains on his underwear. On the stairs leading down to the basement of the empty house, police found a pubic hair identical to Bianchi’s. Carpet fibres on the clothes of the dead girls corresponded to the carpet in the basement of the house. What had happened became clear. Bianchi had offered Karen Mandic the ‘house-sitting job’. When she had arrived, he made some excuse to take her in alone – probably to turn on the electricity. As she preceded him to the basement, he strangled her with a ligature – the angle of the marks on her throat showed that the killer was standing above and behind her. Then he went out and got Diane Wilder. When both girls were dead he had completed some kind of sexual assault – no semen was found inside them – then placed them in Karen’s car and driven it away. Both girls had been sworn to silence about the house-sitting job, ‘for security reasons’, and he had no idea that Diane had told her boyfriend where she was going.

  When Sergeant Frank Salerno, a detective on the Hillside Strangler case, heard of Bianchi’s arrest, he hurried to Bellingham. Bianchi sounded like the tall, acne-scarred young man seen outside Lauren Wagner’s home, and his cousin Angelo Buono, who lived in Glendale, Los Angeles, sounded exactly like the other – the bushy-haired, Latin-looking man. Buono was a highly unsavoury character. He had been married four times, but all his wives had left him because of his brutality – when one of them had refused him sex, he had sodomised her in front of the children. He had also been a pimp, forcing girls into white slavery – and Bianchi had been his partner. He was an obvious suspect as the second Hillside Strangler.

  At this point a strange and interesting development occurred. Bianchi’s lawyer had been impressed by his apparent sincerity in denying that he knew anything about the murders; so was a psychiatric social worker. They sent for Professor John G. Watkins of the University of Montana, and suggested to him that Bianchi might be suffering from the same problem as Billy Milligan (see here) – multiple personality. Watkins placed Bianchi under hypnosis, and within minutes, Bianchi was speaking in a strange, low voice, and introducing himself as someone called Steve. Steve seemed be an unpleasant, violent character with a sneering laugh, and he declared that he hated ‘Ken’ and had done his best to ‘fix him’. Then he described how, one evening in 1977, Ken Bianchi had walked into his cousin’s home, and found Angelo murdering a girl. Steve had then taken over Ken’s body, and become Buono’s willing accomplice in the Hillside Stranglings . . .

  Suddenly, it began to look as if there was no chance of convicting either Bianchi or Buono for the murders. If Bianchi was ‘insane’, then he could not be convicted, and he could not testify against his cousin in court. Another psychiatrist, Ralph B. Allison, the author of a classic on multiple personality called Minds in Many Pieces, also interviewed Bianchi and agreed that he was a genuine ‘MPD’. Soon after the arrests, there was even a book written about the case, The Hillside Strangler by Ted Schwarz, which accepted that Bianchi was a multiple personality.

  At this point, the prosecution decided to call in their own expert, Dr Martin T. Orne. A simple experiment quickly convinced Orne that Bianchi was faking. Good hypnotic subjects can be made to hallucinate the presence of another person. Orne hypnotised Bianchi and told him that his lawyer, Dean Brett, wa
s sitting in an empty chair. Bianchi immediately did something that Orne had never seen before in a hypnotised subject – leaned forward and shook the invisible lawyer warmly by the hand. In Orne’s experience, a truly hypnotised person never tries to touch the hallucination. Orne also felt that Bianchi overplayed the situation, saying ‘Surely you can see him?’ A subject who genuinely ‘saw’ his lawyer would assume that everyone else did too. Bianchi was clearly faking hypnosis. Was he also faking multiple personality?

  Again, an experiment provided the answer. Orne dropped a hint that most ‘multiples’ have at least three personalities. The next time he was under hypnosis, Bianchi immediately produced another personality, a frightened child named Billy. It now seemed virtually certain that Bianchi was malingering.

  It was the police who proved it beyond all doubt. Allison had asked ‘Steve’ if he had a last name, and Steve had mumbled ‘Walker’. Salerno had seen the name Steve Walker in Bianchi’s papers. It proved to be the name of a graduate in psychology from California State University. One of Bianchi’s dreams had been to become a psychiatrist, but he had possessed no qualifications. He had overcome this with a little confidence trickery. He had placed an advertisement in a Los Angeles newspaper offering a job to a graduate in psychology. Thomas Steven Walker had answered the advertisement, and sent Bianchi some of his academic papers. He never saw them again. Bianchi used Walker’s name – and papers – to obtain a diploma from California State University, requesting that the name should not be filled in because he wanted to have it specially engraved. When he received it, Bianchi simply filled in his own name, and set himself up as a psychological counsellor.

  The fact that there was a real Steve Walker, and that Bianchi knew of his existence, finally left no doubt whatever that Bianchi was malingering. At a sanity hearing in October 1979, Orne’s opinion carried the day; Bianchi was judged sane and able to stand trial. Now he realised that he might go to the electric chair for the Hillside Stranglings in Los Angeles, Bianchi hastened to plead guilty to the two Bellingham murders, and to engage in plea-bargaining: to plead guilty to the Bellingham murders and to five of the Hillside Stranglings for a life sentence with a possibility of eventual parole, in exchange for testifying against his cousin Angelo Buono. The plea of guilty made the expense of a full-scale trial unnecessary, and on 21 October Kenneth Bianchi was sentenced to life imprisonment. He sobbed convincingly, and professed deep remorse.

  He was flown to Los Angeles, where his cousin had been arrested, but the case was still far from over. Incredibly, the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office decided that since the chief witness against Buono was his cousin, and that Bianchi was clearly unreliable – if not insane – it might be best to save the cost of a trial by dropping all murder charges against Buono. This extraordinary decision was fortunately overturned by Judge Ronald M. George, who decreed that Buono should stand trial anyway.

  Even in prison, Bianchi made strenuous efforts to persuade various women to supply him with alibis, and one of them actually agreed to claim that he was with her on the night of one of the murders; at the last minute, conscience prevailed and she changed her mind.

  There was still another strange development to come. In June 1980, Bianchi received a letter from a woman signing herself Veronica Lynn Compton, who asked him if he would be willing to co-operate on a play about a female mass murderer who injects semen into the sex organs of her victims to deceive the police into thinking the killer was a male. When Veronica Compton came to see him in prison, Bianchi became distinctly interested. She proved to be a glamorous brunette who was obviously slightly unbalanced. She was fascinated by murder, and together they fantasised about how pleasant it would be to go on a violent crime spree, cut off the private parts of their victims, and preserve them in embalming fluid. Soon afterwards, they were exchanging love letters. Bianchi now suggested that he should prove her love by putting into operation the scheme she had devised for her play: that she should murder a woman in Bellingham and inject her with sperm through a syringe, so that it would appear that the strangler was still at large. The infatuated Veronica agreed. Bianchi provided the sperm by masturbating into the finger of a rubber glove, and smuggling it to her in the spine of a book. Veronica flew to Bellingham and registered at a motel called the Shangri-la. In a nearby bar she got into conversation with a young woman called Kim Breed, and after several drinks, asked her if she would drive her back to her motel. At the Shangri-la, Kim Breed agreed to come in for a final quick drink. In the motel room, Veronica vanished into the toilet, then came out armed with a length of cord; she tiptoed up behind the unsuspecting girl and threw the cord round her neck. Kim Breed was something of an athlete; she managed to throw her attacker over her head. As Veronica Compton lay, winded, on the carpet, Miss Breed fled. When she returned to the motel with a male friend, her attacker had checked out and was on her way back to Los Angeles.

  It proved easy to trace her through her airline reservation. Veronica Compton was arrested, and in due course, the ‘copycat slayer’, as the newspapers labelled her, received life imprisonment for attempted murder.

  The trial of Angelo Buono, which began in November 1981 and ended in November 1983, was the longest murder trial in American history. When it came to Bianchi’s turn to testify, it was obvious that he had no intention of standing by his plea-bargaining agreement; he was vague and contradictory. When Judge George pointed out that he could be returned to Washington’s Walla Walla – a notoriously tough jail – he became marginally more co-operative. Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the murders were described in appalling detail. Buono was finally found guilty of seven of them. Since his cousin had already escaped with life imprisonment, the jury recommended that he should not be sentenced to death. Buono received a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Bianchi was returned to Walla Walla to serve out his sentence. In 1989, he married a ‘pen pal’, Shirlee J. Book, whom he met for the first time the day before the wedding.

  Through the detailed evidence given by Bianchi, it slowly became clear what had turned the cousins into serial sex killers. Angelo Buono, born in New York in October 1935, had been in trouble with the police from the age of fourteen, and spent time in reformatories. He married for the first time at the age of twenty, but his brutality – and his penchant for sodomy – led to divorce; three more unsuccessful marriages followed. In 1975, Buono set up his own car-body repair shop in Glendale, and became known as an excellent upholsterer – one of his customers was Frank Sinatra. In spite of a certain brutal coarseness, he was always attractive to women, and liked to seduce under-age girls. His cousin Kenneth Bianchi joined him in Los Angeles in 1976.

  Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born in May 1951, the child of a Rochester (N.Y.) prostitute who gave him up at birth; he was adopted at the age of three months. (Zoologists have pointed out that the most important ‘imprinting’ occurs in the first weeks of a baby’s life; if a child receives no affection during this time, it remains permanently incapable of any deep relationship, and may become a psychopath.) He proved to be a bright, intelligent child, but a compulsive and pointless liar. Unlike his highly dominant cousin Angelo, Bianchi was a weak-willed person whose chief craving was to be regarded as a ‘somebody’, and he would lie and deceive indefinitely to this end. When rejected by girlfriends, he had a tendency to turn violent. He was also a habitual thief. Unable to hold down a regular job, and turned down by the police force as obviously unsuitable, he decided to move to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-four.

  He moved in with his cousin Angelo, and was deeply impressed by the way the older man bedded teenagers and induced them to perform oral sex. He applied to join the Los Angeles and the Glendale police, but both turned him down. It was then that he decided to set up as a psychiatrist, and placed the advertisement that brought a reply from graduate Steven Walker.

  After a few months, Buono became bored with his weak-willed cousin and asked him to move out. Bianchi found a room in an apartment blo
ck and obtained a job with a real-estate company, which he soon lost when marijuana was found in his desk drawer. Armed with his forged graduation certificate, he rented an office and set up as a psychiatrist, but patients failed to materialise. It was then that Buono made the suggestion that they should become pimps. Bianchi met a sixteen-year-old girl named Sabra Hannan at a party, and offered her a job as a photographic model. When she moved into Bianchi’s house, she was raped, beaten, and forced into prostitution. So was a fifteen-year-old runaway named Becky Spears, who was subjected to sodomy so frequently that she had to wear a tampon in her rectum. These were only a few of Buono’s ‘stable’ of women.

  Problems arose in August 1976 when a Los Angeles lawyer rang and asked for a girl to be sent over. Becky Spears looked so obviously miserable that he asked her how she became a prostitute; when she told him her story he was so horrified that he bought her a plane ticket and put her on the next plane home to Phoenix. Buono was enraged when Becky failed to return and made threatening phone calls. The lawyer countered by sending an enormous Hell’s Angel to see him, backed by a number of equally muscular friends. When Buono – who was working inside a car – ignored his callers, the Hell’s Angel reached in through the window, lifted Buono out by his shirtfront, and asked: ‘Do I have your attention, Mr Buono?’ After that the lawyer received no more threatening phone calls.

  This episode was almost certainly crucial in turning Buono into a serial killer. An intensely ‘macho’ male, he was undoubtedly outraged by the humiliation; in the curiously illogical manner of criminals, he looked around for someone on whom he could lay the blame, and his anger turned against women in general and prostitutes in particular. Soon after, his pride received another affront. From an experienced professional prostitute, Bianchi and Buono had purchased a list of clients who liked to have girls sent to their houses. When he tried to use it, Buono discovered that he had been swindled: it was a list of men who wanted to visit a prostitute on her own premises. The woman who had sold him the list was nowhere to be found. She had been accompanied by a black prostitute named Yolanda Washington, who worked on Hollywood Boulevard. On 16 October 1977 Bianchi and Buono picked up Yolanda Washington, and both raped her before Bianchi strangled her in the back of the car. She was the first victim of the Hillside Stranglers.