Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (34 page)

Thrill murders often involve three distinct crime scenes—where the victim is captured, a highly controlled environment where the victim is tortured and killed, and finally a site where the victim is quickly dumped. Thrill killers are often attractive, intelligent, charismatic psychopathic personalities, relying on their charm to seduce and lure victims to their deaths. They may pose as police officers and “arrest” their victims. They are highly controlled and controlling, carefully selecting and stalking their desired victim type. They either maintain a carefully chosen location where they torture and murder their victims or customize a vehicle, frequently a van, for their killing. The body is often disposed of so as to deliberately lead investigators away from the killing scene.

 Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono—“The Hillside Stranglers”

Operating as a team, these two cousins terrorized Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, committing a series of rapes and murders of women. Many of the victims were dumped on the sides of the Hollywood Hills, and the media dubbed the presumed killer “The Hillside Strangler.” The police, however, knew because of seminal fluids and the positions of the bodies that two individuals were killing together. They withheld this information from the press.

The first victim was a black prostitute, Yolanda Washington, who walked the Sunset Boulevard area. Her naked body was found on October 18, 1977, on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway. Her murder merited a few lines in the newspapers in the back pages.

Fifteen-year-old Judy Miller went missing on October 31, 1977, in the Hollywood Boulevard area. She was a runaway, a drug user, and an occasional prostitute. Her body was found tossed in a flowerbed in La Crescenta. She had been vaginally and anally raped and traces of adhesive tape were found on her mouth, wrists, and ankles.

On November 6, 1977, the corpse of Lisa Teresa Kastin was found in Glendale. Unlike the other two victims, Kastin was not a runaway, drug user, or prostitute—she was working at two jobs: as a waitress and for her father’s real estate company.

On November 10, 1977, the body of Jill Barcomb, eighteen, a convicted prostitute, was found off of Mulholland Drive. Kathleen Robertson, seventeen, also part of the Hollywood Boulevard street scene, was found on November 17. Kristina Weckler, twenty, an art student, was found on November 20—she had been tortured prior to being killed. On the same day, the police found the bodies of Sonja Johnson, fourteen, and Dollie Cepeda, twelve. They were last seen at a shopping mall together. On November 23, Jane King, twenty-eight, a struggling actress, was found in the Los Feliz extension area. November ended with the discovery of Lauren Wagner, eighteen, a business school student whose raped and strangled corpse was found off Cliff Drive. There was little doubt that the murders were linked: almost all the bodies were nude; raped by two individuals; previously bound, gagged, and handcuffed; and tossed off the sides of roads or highways, often at hill sites above Hollywood, out of view of any houses. The police were also worried that the killers might have been police officers or somebody very familiar with police procedures. Virtually no evidence accompanied the corpses, and they had been obviously carefully stripped to further reduce any possibility of forensic links.

On December 15, seventeen-year-old prostitute Kimberly Martin was dispatched by her call girl agency to the Tamarind Terrace apartments in Hollywood. She had joined the agency because she feared exposing herself on the streets with the Hillside Strangler on the loose. Her naked body was found on a deserted lot near Los Angeles City Hall. When the police checked the apartment she had been dispatched to, they found it vacant and broken into. The killers had placed the call from a library pay phone nearby and then waited for their victim in the apartment.

The last known victim was discovered on February 17, 1978, when somebody reported seeing a car halfway down a cliff off Angeles Crest Highway. When police investigated the vehicle, they found in the trunk the raped and sodomized nude body of Cindy Hudspeth, a twenty-year-old student and part-time waitress.

Then the murders ceased as mysteriously as they began.

Eleven months later, in Bellingham, Washington, some 1,000 miles north of Los Angeles, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, two university students, disappeared.

Mandic worked part-time in a store during the evenings, and the previous summer she had made friends with a security guard who had worked there for a short time. He was a friendly, popular, and handsome young man who went on to become a supervisor with a Bellingham security company. His name was Kenneth Bianchi and he was twenty-seven years old. He lived with a local girl named Kelli Boyd and they had an infant son on whom Kenneth doted.

One day in January, Bianchi mentioned to Karen Mandic that he had a great opportunity for her to make a hundred dollars for two hours’ work. An alarm system in a house that his company was watching needed repair. The owners were away on a trip. Karen would be paid a hundred dollars to house-sit for two hours while the alarm was disconnected for repairs. Karen asked if she could bring her roommate, Diane Wilder, on the job. Of course she could, Bianchi told her. Only one thing: She must keep the job a secret until after it was done—nobody must know, not even her boyfriend. Karen however, told her boyfriend.

Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder were found raped and strangled in the trunk of their car parked on a dead-end street in Bellingham. The police didn’t take long to make the connection to Kenneth Bianchi, and when his security company reported no knowledge of any alarm repair scheduled for the house in question, but the keys to the house missing, Bianchi was arrested.

As police gathered physical evidence from the house where the girls were lured to and murdered and from Kenneth Bianchi’s apartment and his vehicle, there was little doubt that he had committed the crime. Yet nobody could quite believe it: Kelli Boyd maintained that Bianchi was a gentle lover and caring father to their son; the security company, run by a former police officer, reported that Bianchi was one of their best employees, a popular guard who was often requested by clients; and friends came forward maintaining that Bianchi was too gentle to have committed such brutal crimes.

The chief of police in Bellingham was a former Los Angeles–area police officer. During the Hillside stranglings, one of the victims was the daughter of a man he knew, and he had spoken to him at length about her murder. Through his contacts in Los Angeles, the chief was familiar with the series of murders there. Something about this murder reminded him of the crimes there. One of the first questions he put to Kelli was about Kenneth Bianchi’s background. Kelli replied that she had met him in Los Angeles about eighteen months ago when she lived there. After she had the baby, she moved back home to Bellingham and Kenneth Bianchi had followed in May of last year—three months after the Hillside stranglings had ceased.

Within hours, the chief was on the phone to Los Angeles. The links began to come together quickly the more Kelli was interviewed. Kelli and Bianchi once lived at the Tamarind building where the call girl was lured to a vacant apartment. Kelli reported that at one point they did not have a phone, and that Kenneth placed phone calls from a pay phone in the Glendale library—the same pay phone used to make the appointment for the call girl. When Kelli first met Bianchi, he lived on Garfield Avenue, where two of the Hillside victims were last seen. As the evidence began to gather, Kenneth Bianchi was charged in the Los Angeles stranglings as well.

Bianchi claimed that he could not remember committing any crimes, and psychiatrists were called in to assess his claims. Under hypnosis, Bianchi began to reveal other personalities that were allegedly living inside him—including one named “Steve Walker.” It was “Steve” who identified Bianchi’s accomplice—his forty-four-year-old cousin in Los Angeles, Angelo Bouno.

Under hypnosis, “Steve” emerged, claiming that Kenneth was a stupid and mild little man, that “Steve” hated women and made Kenneth commit the murders. “Steve Walker” described in detail how Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi posed as plainclothes policemen to lure women into their car. The prostitutes and runaways were “arrested.” The two girls at the shopping mall were spotted shoplifting by Bianchi and Buono and were also “arrested.”

One woman was lured out of her apartment when Bianchi called at her door and told her an accident had happened with her car in the street. She had met Bianchi before and did not hesitate to follow him out. Many of the victims were taken back to Angelo Buono’s upholstery shop in Glendale and raped and strangled there, before their bodies were stripped of all clothing and jewelry and tossed on hillsides by the two killers.

Another woman came to the shop to buy some seat covers for her car—she was overpowered, raped, and murdered. She was the last victim who was found in the trunk of her car, which was pushed down a hillside. Another victim was waiting for a bus when Kenneth Bianchi struck up a casual conversation with her and told her he and his partner were police officers at the end of their shift. The handsome Bianchi would be glad to give her a ride home if she did not mind taking a short detour while he dropped his partner off home first. The woman gladly went along. When they got to Buono’s house, she was handcuffed and quickly hustled inside.

At one point, Buono and Bianchi “arrested” twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Lorre, the daughter of actor Peter Lorre, who portrayed a serial killer in the classic 1931 Fritz Lang movie
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When they found a picture of the woman sitting on Peter Lorre’s lap among her identification, they let her go. Later she told police that they had approached her, flashing L.A. police badges (allegedly stolen by Buono from the set of a TV show).

Bianchi had almost convinced a board of six psychiatrists that he was legally insane and suffering from multiple personalities. The police, however, discovered that Bianchi owned a large collection of psychiatric textbooks and was an “amateur” psychiatrist who had actually opened a psychological counseling office in Los Angeles. It folded quickly when he could get only one patient. Bianchi had attempted to open the office with other legitimate psychiatrists and advertised seeking fellow tenants. One of the psychiatrists who responded to Bianchi and sent him a résumé was a doctor named Steve Walker, the police discovered. Bianchi then used the résumé to secure a copy of Walker’s diploma, which he altered by inserting his own name. The “Steve Walker” that existed within Bianchi was supposed to have existed since his childhood, but Bianchi had received the real Steve Walker’s résumé only a year previously.

Finally one psychiatrist broke through Bianchi’s game. He hypnotized Bianchi and told him to hallucinate that his lawyer was in the room. Bianchi immediately reached out into empty space and shook hands with the nonexisting lawyer. The problem is that while hypnotized subjects can be made to hallucinate people and objects, they do not hallucinate physical contact with them. Bianchi was obviously pretending to be hypnotized and his insanity plea was rejected.

Kenneth Bianchi was born in 1951 in Rochester, New York, to a seventeen-year-old alcoholic who gave him up for adoption; thus there was a possibility of prenatal brain damage. He was adopted at age three months by Frances Bianchi, an overprotective, anxious, and hysterical woman. There is a rich record of psychiatric and medical reports on Bianchi as a child, who was constantly brought to doctors by his mother for various imagined complaints. One that was not imagined was his tendency to wet his pants and bed, a common childhood symptom among serial killers. A medical report on Kenneth when he was seven years old reads as follows:

He had been admitted to the hospital on 12-15-58 with a diagnosis of genitourinary problems. His diagnoses now were: 1. Diverticulum, 2. Horseshoe kidney and 3. Transient hypertension. Dr. Townsend said that although these were physical problems for this boy, he also had many emotional problems. He proved to be “a little minx” on the floor. Everything went fine during the day except during visiting hours when his mother was there and then everything was wrong, especially for his mother’s benefit. He would have one complaint after another and Mrs. Bianchi would take these up with any available nurse or doctor who happened to be handy. Having this child hospitalized proved to be a trying experience and Dr. Townsend wondered if his social or home environment could be considered at all adequate.

A doctor’s report dated March 13, 1959, stated:

The impression is gained that this mother is herself a seriously disturbed person, and her discussion about the handling of the child by various medical men indicates some apparent paranoid trends. It is apparent that she had been strongly controlling toward this boy, keeping him out of school very frequently, particularly in the last several months, because of her fear that he would develop a sore throat and begin to wet. It is not clear whether this mother can carry through successfully with a psychiatric evaluation, but it is felt that diagnostic study should be offered, in order to clarify more fully the degree of personality disturbance on the part of the boy, the boy’s presenting symptom, and the nature of the family relationships, including the degree of disturbance on the part of the mother in particular.