Darcy OBrien - The Hillside Stranglers

PREFACE

In the urban America of today, murder has become so common-place that it often goes almost unnoticed. Occasionally, however, even in a society numbed by violence, analysis, and explanation, certain murders gain publicity by virtue of their peculiar horrors. Ordinary citizens recognize for the moment that they and the civilized life their democracy is supposed to protect are under threat. The routines of daily life are interrupted by a mass anxiety. We grow afraid.

Such was the atmosphere of Los Angeles in recent years, when the term Hillside Strangler entered the citys and, given the efficiency of modern communications, even the nations vocabulary. Actually there were two Hillside Stranglers, but the singular cropped up first and tended to stick. They were cousins, aged forty-four and twenty-six at the time they began killing women in Los Angeles in 1977. Between October of that year and February 1978, they raped, tortured, and strangled to death ten young women and girls, dumping the bruised and stripped bodies mostly on hillsides northeast of downtown. During Thanksgiving week alone five bodies turned up, the victims ranging in age from twelve to twenty-eight.

That was when the panic set in. These five were linked to at least three other killings. In December another body was found nude and spread-eagled on a hillside facing City Hall, as though the killers were making an obscene and defiant gesture toward the city itself. After the New Year, it appeared that the killers had had their fill. They were at large, but by the end of January the city began to breathe a little easier, and stories about the Hillside murders dwindled in the newspapers and on television. But then in February another body: this an eighteen-year-old girl stuffed into the trunk of her new car, which had been pushed over a cliff high on Angeles Crest. The panic renewed itself. Public anger turned on the police, who despite a task force numbering nearly a hundred officers seemed baffled.

Women, if they had to go out at all at night, hurried from their cars to what they hoped was the safety of their houses. Yet one victim, a student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design, appeared to have been abducted from her own apartment; another had apparently been dragged from her car parked just across the street from her parents house. The victims seemed to have been picked at random and from various parts of the sprawling city: Hollywood, Glendale, the San Fernando Valley. No neighborhood felt safe. The killer or killers might strike anywhere. One victim had been waiting for a bus in Hollywood; another had last been seen leaving her Glendale apartment in her car to go to work.

Nor were the victims alike in appearance or occupation. One was black, one Hispanic, the others Caucasians ranging from dark to fair. The first two and the eighth victims had been prostitutes, the others students and working women. The killers appeared indifferent only to the old; otherwise their tastes were catholic.

Then abruptly the killings stopped. Had the Strangler or Stranglers simply had enough, or were they afraid of getting caught? Would they resume their spree, once they thought the heat was off? The police had made a couple of arrests, but these suspects proved innocent of the Hillside murders. The first anniversary of the first killing passed with no important, nerve-flaying questions answered. Not even the actual site of the murders, if there was one site, was known. Psychiatrists offered psychological profiles of the killer or killers, but their opinions were contradictory, linked only by the theme of hatred of women.

In January 1979, the case broke. The younger of the Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi, had moved to far-northern Washington State, where on his own he had strangled to death two more young women, college students. He had left several clues and was arrested immediately by local police. His drivers license showed a Los Angeles address, and when the local police telephoned the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office for a background check, a primary investigator on the Hillside case happened to take the call. He knew immediately from Bianchis L.A. address, which was identical to that of one of the Hillside victims, that at least one of the Stranglers had been caught. From there it was easy to find the other, Angelo Buono, a Glendale auto upholsterer who was Bianchis cousin and only close male friend.

But the ordeal for the police and for the city, apparently over, had only just begun. Bianchi, an articulate young man, at first denied everything and then, supposedly under hypnosis, displayed the classic manifestations of a multiple personality. He apparently revealed that an alter ego, whom he called Steve, had committed the murders, of which Kenneth knew nothing. A third personality, called Billy, later emerged, and possibly a fourth and a fifth. Bianchi implicated his cousin Buono, who he said had collaborated with Steve in the Hillside murders; Steve alone had killed the two girls in Washington. Bianchis lawyer entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, supported by a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Buono, meanwhile, was under surveillance by Los Angeles police, but he remained free, denying any connection to the Hillside killings. If Bianchis insanity defense proved successful, he would hardly make a believable witness against his cousin.

Bianchis insanity plea was challenged, however, by two other psychiatrists, and discoveries made by two Los Angeles homicide detectives further weakened his credibility. After several months of conflicting diagnoses in Washington, Bianchi made a deal with the Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office and the Washington authorities. He would plead guilty to the Washington murders and to five of the Hillside murders, and he would come to L.A. to testify against Buono. In return he would get life with the possibility of parole, and he would be permitted to serve his sentence in California, where the prisons were more comfortable than in Washington. Had he not made the deal, he would have faced the death penalty in Washington and possibly in California.

In October 1979, police arrested Angelo Buono in Los Angeles, and he was charged with ten counts of premeditated murder. A ten-month-long preliminary hearing, lasting until March 1981, resulted in an order for Buono to stand trial on all ten counts. Because he was accused of multiple murders, he faced the death penalty.

As soon as Kenneth Bianchi was brought to Los Angeles, he began violating his agreement to testify against his cousin. His testimony became a morass of contradictions. At times he asserted that he knew nothing of the Hillside killings and that he had no idea whether his cousin Buono had been involved or not. Meanwhile a mysterious Los Angeles woman, an actress and playwright named Veronica Compton, who had visited Bianchi in jail, traveled up to Washington and there attempted to strangle to death a woman she had picked up in a bar. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of premeditated attempted murder, and she was sentenced to life. She became known as the Copycat Strangler. Apparently she had acted out of some strange affection for Bianchi, trying to exonerate him from the Washington murders.