The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (23 page)

“Any person who puts dog food and human remains in a food processor and calls it a gourmet meal and feeds it to others is out to lunch.”

A
TTORNEY
C
HUCK
P
ERUTO
J
R
.,
referring to his client Gary Heidnik

The Hillside Stranglers

When the corpses started piling up—young women who had been tortured, raped, and strangled—the papers blared the news: a serial killer was on the loose. They dubbed him the “Hillside Strangler” because the bulk of the bodies were deposited on hillsides around the Los Angeles area. But the newspapers were wrong. The grisly crimes weren’t the work of a serial killer.

They were the demented teamwork of
two
serial killers.

The first to die was a black prostitute, whose naked corpse was dumped near Forest Lawn Cemetery in mid-October 1977. Two weeks later, the body of a fifteen-year-old female runaway turned up in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. Over the next few months, eight more bodies would be found. The victims ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight. All had been sexually violated (sometimes with objects like soda bottles), strangled, and tortured in a variety of ways. One had been burned with an electric cord. Another had been injected with cleaning solution. Yet another had been killed with voluptuous cruelty—strangled to the point of unconsciousness, then revived, then strangled again, and so on until her tormentor finally put her to death.

From early on in their investigation, police suspected that two killers were involved, since semen found inside the victims indicated that the women had been raped (often both vaginally and anally) by different men. That suspicion was confirmed when an eyewitness caught sight of two men forcing a young woman into their car.

As a rule, serial killers keep murdering until they are caught. In February 1978, however—four months after they started—the Hillside Stranglings abruptly ceased. The killers might well have gotten away with their atrocities—if it hadn’t been for the twisted compulsions of one member of the unspeakable duo.

One year after the last of the Los Angeles murders, two young women were raped and strangled in Bellingham, Washington. Suspicion immediately lighted on a twenty-six-year-old security guard named Kenneth Bianchi, who had recently moved to Bellingham from Los Angeles. Before long, police had ferreted out the truth—Bianchi and his forty-four-year-old cousin, a brutish sociopath named Angelo Buono, were the Hillside Stranglers.

Though Buono led an outwardly respectable life as the owner of a successful auto upholstery business, he was also a sadistic pimp with a long history of violence against women. (He allegedly once sodomized his wife in front of their children after she refused to have sex with him.) Bianchi was a small-time con artist who had moved in with his cousin after relocating from Rochester, New York, in 1976. Separately, neither one had ever been known to commit murder—but together, they brought out the most monstrous impulses in each other. (See
Folie à Deux
.
)

For a while, Bianchi had authorities believing that he suffered from a split personality. Ostensibly, it was his evil alter ego, “Steve,” who had participated in the murders. But a psychiatric expert finally established that “Steve”—a sadistic sex killer who emerged under hypnosis—was a ruse.

In the end—in order to avoid a death sentence—Bianchi agreed to plead guilty to the murders and to testify against his cousin, who was convicted after a highly protracted trial. Both Hillside Stranglers are currently serving life sentences.

H
ISTORY

Reviewing the history of serial murder is a tricky proposition, since it’s hard to know exactly where to begin. On the one hand, serial killing seems like a uniquely modern phenomenon, a symptom of the various ills afflicting late-twentieth-century America—alienation, social decay, sexual violence, rampant crime, etc. On the other hand, the savage, sadistic impulses that underlie serial murder are undoubtedly as old as humankind.

Any historical survey of serial murder would have to begin at least as far
back as ancient Rome, when the emperor Caligula was busily indulging his taste for torture and perversion. During the Middle Ages, depraved
Aristocrats
like Gilles de Rais (the original
“
Bluebeard
”
) and Elizabeth Bathory (the “Blood Countess”) fed their unholy lusts on the blood of hundreds of victims, while psychopathic peasants like Gilles Gamier and Peter Stubbe butchered their victims with such bestial ferocity that they were believed to be literal werewolves (see
Lycanthropy
). Other homicidal monsters of the premodern era include the Scottish cannibal Sawney Beane (see
Clans
) and Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Dracula (see
Vampires
).

Most crime buffs agree that the first serial sex killer of the modern era was
Jack the Ripper
, whose crimes—the ghastly slaughter of five London streetwalkers—sent shock waves throughout Victorian England. One hundred years later, the serial slaying of prostitutes has become such a commonplace activity that (to cite just one of many examples) when, in July 1995, a former warehouse clerk named William Lester Suff was convicted of killing thirteen hookers in Southern California, the media barely noted the event. That shift sums up the history of serial murder in the twentieth century: its appalling transformation from a monstrous anomaly into an everyday horror.

Jack the Ripper’s American contemporary, H. H.
Holmes
, who confessed to twenty-seven murders in the late 1890s, is regarded as Americas first documented serial killer. Two full decades would pass before another one appeared on the scene: the unknown maniac dubbed the “Axeman of New Orleans,” who terrorized that city between 1918 and 1919 (see
Axe Murderers
).

Though it was a violent and lawless decade, the Roaring Twenties produced only two authentic serial killers: Earle Leonard
Nelson
—the serial strangler nicknamed the “Gorilla Murderer”—and the viciously depraved Carl
Panzram
.
Serial killers were equally few and far between in the 1930s and 1940s. The cannibalistic pedophile Albert
Fish
and the anonymous psycho known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” (aka the “Cleveland Torso Killer”) are the only known serial killers of Depression-era America. The roster of 1940s serial killers is also limited to a pair of names: Jake Bird, a homicidal burglar who confessed to a dozen axe murders, and William Heirens, famous for his desperate,
Lipstick
-scrawled plea: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

It wasn’t until the post-World War II period that serial murder became
rampant in this country. Its shadow was already beginning to spread during the sunny days of the Eisenhower era. The 1950s witnessed the depredations of Wisconsin ghoul Ed
Gein
;
the voyeuristic horrors of Californian Harvey Murray Glatman (who photographed his bound, terrorized victims before murdering them); the crimes of homicidal scam artists Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez (the “Lonely Hearts Killers”); and the bloody rampage of Charles Starkweather, who slaughtered a string of victims as he hot-rodded across the Nebraska badlands.

The situation became even grimmer during the 1960s, a period that produced such infamous figures as Melvin “Sex Beast” Rees, Albert “Boston Strangler”
DeSalvo
, Richard
Speck
, Charles
Manson
, and the still-unknown
Zodiac
.
By the time the 1970s rolled around, the problem had become so dire that, for the first time, law enforcement officials felt the need to define this burgeoning phenomenon as a major category of crime (see
Definition/ Coining a Phrase
). The 1970s was the decade of
Berkowitz
and
Bundy
,
Kemper
and
Gacy
, Bianchi and Buono (the
“
Hillside Stranglers
”), and more.

By the 1980s, some criminologists were bandying words like
plague
and
epidemic
to characterize the problem. Though these terms smack of hysteria, it is nevertheless true that serial homicide has become so common in our country that most of its perpetrators stir up only local interest. Only the most ghastly of these killers, the ones who seem more like mythic monsters than criminals—Jeffrey
Dahmer
, for example—capture the attention of the entire nation and end up as creepy household names.

In view of this grim chronicle, it’s hard not to agree with Voltaire’s famous definition. “History,” he wrote, “is little else than a picture of human crime and misfortune.”