Serial Killer Investigations (22 page)

For a Right Man such as Buono, this must have seemed the worst thing that had ever happened to him, a shattering assault on his masculinity. His reaction was murderous rage, and the determination to take it out on a woman.

Bianchi happened to be feeling the same. By this time, Sabra had also run away, and her replacement, a girl named Jennifer, had violently resisted when Bianchi tried to sodomise her. And both men were furious with a prostitute named Debbie Noble, who had swindled them by selling them a list of clients that was supposed to be of men who liked woman to come to their homes, but was in fact of men who wanted to visit a prostitute on her own premises. They both felt like murder.

On 17 October 1977, they encountered Yolanda Washington, a 19-year-old prostitute who happened to work with Debbie Noble. The cousins picked her up on a corner of Sunset Boulevard and Buono had sex with her in the back of the car. He then flashed her a police badge, and announced that she was under arrest. She began to scream and struggle until he handcuffed her. Then Bianchi raped her in the back seat before garrotting her with a rag. Finally, the two men dumped her naked body near the entrance to Forest Lawn Cemetery, in a position where it would easily draw attention.

For Buono and Bianchi, the experience was exhilarating. Surprised at how much they enjoyed raping and killing a woman, they agreed to repeat the experience as soon as possible. They decided the time was right just two weeks later, on Halloween, but this time they wanted to do it at Buono’s place. They wanted the luxury of time. They picked up Judy Ann Miller, a 15-year-old hooker, and in Buono’s bedroom they bound and blindfolded her, and then took their turns raping her. Then they pulled a plastic bag down over her head and tied it around her neck. Bianchi sat on her legs as Buono strangled her with a cord. They dumped her body in La Crescenta, a town just north of Glendale, once again in a highly visible position.

Just a week later, they were ready for more, and 6 November 1977 found them cruising for another victim. They picked up 21-year-old Lissa Kastin, on her way home from her job as a waitress on Hollywood Boulevard. Again they posed as policemen and instead of the station drove her back to Buono’s place. Neither of them found her sexually desirable, so they made no attempt to rape her, but instead violated her with a root beer bottle. They took nearly an hour to kill her, repeatedly tightening a cord around her neck until she was almost dead, and then releasing it. They left her naked body near the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale.

Three days later, on 9 November they were out ‘hunting’ again. Bianchi spotted an attractive young woman waiting alone at a bus stop and struck up a conversation with her; she told him she was a Scientology student, and Bianchi feigned interest, asking her to tell him all about it. In the midst of the conversation, Buono drove up, pretended he hadn’t seen Bianchi for months, and offered him a lift home. Jane King made the mistake of agreeing to let them drive her home, too. Back in Buono’s house, they were delighted to find that her pubis was shaven. She resisted Buono’s rape, and struggled so hard as Bianchi tried to penetrate her anally that they decided she needed a ‘lesson’. She was hog-tied, and a plastic bag placed over her head while Bianchi sodomised her; by the time Bianchi climaxed she was dead. They dumped her body near an exit ramp of the Golden State freeway. They were surprised to read later in the newspaper that Jane was 28; she looked younger.

Her shaven pubis had excited them both; it conjured images of raping a virgin. Only four days after killing Jane, they observed two schoolgirls, Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, boarding a bus at Eagle Rock Plaza. Now, the idea of raping two girls at once struck their fancy. They followed the bus, and when the girls disembarked near their homes, beckoned them over to the car. Bianchi identified himself as a policeman and informed them that a dangerous burglar was loose in the neighbourhood. The girls were vulnerable; they had just stolen a hundred-dollars worth of costume jewellery from a department store, and were not disposed to argue with the law.

As with their other victims, there was no ride to the station, but only the drive to Buono’s house. There they were both brutally violated. Sonja was murdered in the bedroom. When they came to get Dolores, the terrified girl asked: ‘Where’s Sonja?’ Buono calmly told her: ‘You’ll be seeing her soon.’ The girls’ corpses were dumped on a rubbish tip that Buono knew from his courting days. The police had reasoned, correctly, that whoever had dumped the bodies must have known the area intimately.

As they followed in such quick succession, the crimes began to receive extensive publicity. Because the bodies were usually dumped on slopes, the local press labelled the killer the ‘Hillside Strangler’. Newspapers around the world soon took up the soubriquet, which had the same touch of brutality as ‘Jack the Ripper’ or the ‘Boston Strangler’.

The next victim was Kristina Weckler, a young woman who had spurned Bianchi’s advances when they both lived in an apartment building on East Garfield Avenue in Glendale. Kristina stilled lived there and was a student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design. They knocked on her door, and Bianchi said: ‘Hi, remember me?’ He told her that he was now a member of the police reserve, and that someone had crashed into Kristina’s VW, parked outside the building. She went downstairs with them to check out the damage, but was instead wrestled into Buono’s car and driven to his house. After raping her, they decided to try a new method of murder: injecting her with a cleaning fluid. It produced convulsions, but not death. At Buono’s suggestion, they placed a bag over her head and piped coal gas into it, strangling her at the same time.

The Thanksgiving killing spree was almost over. On Monday 28 November 1977, they saw a redheaded young woman climbing into her car, and followed it. And when Lauren Wagner pulled up in front of her parents’ home, Bianchi again flashed his phoney police badge and told her that she was under arrest. Even as she protested—and a dog barked loudly in a nearby house, causing a woman to look out of the window—they bundled her into their car and drove her away. When she realised that their purpose was rape, she pretended to be cooperative, mentioning that she had spent the evening in bed with her boyfriend and was ready for more. While being raped she behaved as if she enjoyed it. Her desperate act didn’t save her life; the brutal cousins strangled her anyway, after an unsuccessful attempt to electrocute her had only produced burns on her palms.

The realisation that a neighbour had witnessed the abduction made them decide to use more caution. Nevertheless, three weeks later, both men were dreaming of another rape. Kimberly Martin, a call girl, was summoned to Bianchi’s apartment, and taken back to Buono’s house. After raping her, they agreed that she was no good in bed. Her body was dumped in a vacant lot.

The final Hillside Strangler killing was almost an accident. On 16 February Bianchi arrived at Buono’s house to find an orange Datsun parked outside. Cindy Hudspeth had called to ask Buono to make new mats for her car. The opportunity was too good to miss. She was spread-eagled naked on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the posts, and then raped for two hours. When the cousins were done with her, they strangled her. The Datsun was pushed off a cliff with her body in the trunk.

Bianchi had been twice questioned by the police in routine enquiries—but he was one of thousands. Buono was nonetheless becoming nervous and irritable. He was getting sick of his cousin’s lack of maturity, his naivety, and his carelessness. So when Bianchi told him that his pregnant girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, had left him and moved back to Bellingham, Washington, Buono strongly advised him to join her. At first Bianchi was unwilling—his admiration of his cousin amounted almost to worship—but as always, Buono’s will prevailed.

On 21 May 1978, Bianchi drove to Bellingham and rejoined Kelli and their newborn son. He obtained a job as a security guard, and was soon promoted to supervisor. But the small town bored him. He longed to prove to his cousin that he had the makings of a master criminal. And in the first week of January 1979, his craving for rape and murder became an intolerable itch. His mind went back to Karen Mandic, an attractive 22-year-old student whom he had known when he worked in as a department store security guard.

On 11 January 1979, Bianchi telephoned Karen and offered her a house-sitting job in the Bayside area. He swore her to silence ‘for security reasons’, but Karen nonetheless told her boyfriend where she was going. She also telephoned a friend who was a security guard at the university and told him about the job. Her friend was suspicious about the size of the remuneration, $100 for an evening, but he knew that the Bayside area contained many wealthy homes, full of valuables. If this was one of them, it could be worth it.

At seven o’clock that evening, Karen and her friend Diane Wilder drove to the Bayside house. Bianchi was already waiting for them in his security truck. Karen parked her car in the driveway, outside the front door, and Bianchi asked her to accompany him inside to turn on the lights, while Diane waited in the Mercury. When he reappeared a few minutes later, Diane had no suspicion that her friend was now lying dead in the basement. Like Karen, Diane walked down the stairs with Bianchi behind her, and the ligature was dropped over her head and pulled tight.

For some reason, Bianchi did not rape the girls, merely ejaculated on their underwear. He carried both bodies out to Karen’s car, and lifted them into the back. He drove to a cul-de-sac, carefully wiped the car clean of fingerprints, and walked back to the Bayside house where his own truck was parked, disposing of the ligature on the way.

The Mercury was soon found, and Bianchi was interviewed by the police. He said that he had never heard of the two young women, and had certainly not offered them a house-sitting job. But a search of his home revealed all kinds of expensive items that he had stolen as a security guard.

The baffling thing about the crime was that it seemed so oddly pointless. If it was a sex crime, why were the victims not raped?

Still, the case against Bianchi looked conclusive, even though he continued to insist—with the greatest apparent sincerity—that he had no memory of the murders. His bail was posted at $150,000. And now that he was safely in jail, the police began checking on his background. Since he had been living in Glendale, north of downtown Los Angeles, an investigating detective rang the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department to see if they knew anything about Bianchi. Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno of the Homicide Division took the call. When Salerno heard that a former Glendale resident named Kenneth Bianchi had been booked on suspicion of a double sex murder, anticipation gripped him. For the past 14 months, Salerno had been hunting for the Hillside Strangler, whose last murder had taken place shortly before Bianchi left Los Angeles for Bellingham in the previous May.

Salerno lost no time in getting to Bellingham, and within hours of arriving, he was certain that he had found at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. A large cache of jewellery had been found in Bianchi’s apartment, and two items matched jewellery taken from the Hillside victims.

Bianchi, continuing to behave like an innocent man, was highly cooperative. He told the police that his only close friend in Los Angeles was his cousin Angelo Buono, an automobile upholsterer who owned a house in Glendale. A check on Buono—by an undercover agent—made it seem highly likely that he was the other Strangler. He had bushy hair, as did one of the men seen by the woman who had observed them abducting Lauren Wagner.

Interviewed by the police, Buono’s attitude had an undertone of mockery; he seemed to be enjoying the thought that the police had no real evidence against him. All that, Salerno reflected with satisfaction, would change when his cousin returned to Los Angeles.

Yet, with bewildering suddenness, the whole case threatened to collapse. Kenneth Bianchi had managed to have himself declared legally insane, or, the next best thing: he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. In layman’s parlance, MPD is a mental condition in which two or more personalities appear to inhabit one body. In Bianchi’s case, he was diagnosed a Jekyll and Hyde character whose Jekyll was totally unaware of the existence of an evil alter ego.

Ever since his arrest, Bianchi had been insisting that he remembered absolutely nothing of the evening on which he killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. The police, understandably, thought that was a feeble and not very inventive attempt to wriggle out of responsibility. But Bianchi’s lawyer, Dean Brett, was impressed by his apparent sincerity, his protestations of horror at the thought of killing two women, and his hints that he was contemplating suicide. He called in a psychiatric social worker, John Johnston, who was equally impressed by Bianchi’s charm, gentleness, and intelligence. If his protestations of amnesia were genuine, then there was only one possible conclusion: he was a victim of MPD.

Although the medical world had been debating the existence of this rare illness since the nineteenth century, the 1957 movie
The Three Faces of Eve
, based on the book by psychiatrists C. H. Thigpen and H. M. Cleckley, brought the riddle of multiple personality disorder to the general public. MPD therapists posit that the disorder is caused by severe psychological traumas in childhood, experiences so horrific (such as sexual abuse or extreme cruelty) that the personality literally blots them out and hides them away in some remote corner of the mind. In later life, a violent shock can reactivate the trauma, and the everyday self blanks out, and a new personality takes over—for hours or sometimes days or months.

Whether Bianchi knew about this rare psychological illness at this stage is a matter for debate—the police were certainly unaware that he was an avid student of psychology, who hoped one day to become a professional psychoanalyst. What is clear is that Johnston’s suggestion was seized upon with enthusiasm. Equally significant for Bianchi was a showing of the made-for-television film
Sybil
—another study of multiple personality—on the prison TV From this, he learned that ‘multiples’ often suffer from blinding headaches and weird dreams. He also learned that psychiatrists try to gain access to the ‘other self’ through hypnosis.