Homicidal cousins and the Hillside Stranglers case: A trial that nearly did not happen

Los Angeles Times

7 days ago

Angelo Buono was the elder of the killers. He was wiry and foul-mouthed, a swaggering 44-year-old high school dropout who ran a solo auto-upholstery business out of his Glendale garage. A sometime pimp, he fancied himself a ladies' man. He flew an Italian flag at his yellow house.
His cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, was the more outwardly polished of their cruel partnership. Detectives would call him 'Slick Ken.' He was 27, an aspiring cop with a Hollywood apartment and a glib patter that reminded people of a used-car salesman. He had a closetful of bogus diplomas and liked to pose as a sex therapist.
To lure girls and young women back to Buono's house, the cousins posed as vice officers and flashed fake badges. They raped, tortured and killed their victims between October 1977 and February 1978, and left them to be found in ways that seemed designed to taunt police and maximize public terror.
Their targets included runaways and aspiring actresses. Some were waiting at bus stops. Some were working as prostitutes. Some were college students.
The bodies, with cord marks on their necks and limbs, had been stripped of clothing and dumped — sometimes posed — on hillsides around Los Angeles County.
The killings made the news, but did not elicit widespread panic until November 1977. That's when four victims were found during a one-week stretch, including two Highland Park girls, ages 12 and 14, who were last seen at the Eagle Rock Plaza.
An Eagle Rock woman wrote in The Times that the killer 'has made us all wretched' with fear, and reported a conversation between a grocery store customer and a clerk:
'Where is everybody?'
'At home watching TV, to see if they know the girl who just got killed.'
It's hard to trace the origins of the name, but it became official late that year, as the LAPD launched the Hillside Strangler Task Force.
By early 1978, with at least ten known victims, the staff had grown to 162 cops, including Glendale officers and sheriff's deputies, with a 24-hour tip hotline.
'Inside Parker Center we were in disarray, choking on tips, leads, and clues,' Daryl Gates, the former LAPD chief, wrote in his memoir 'Chief.'
'We had, in time, more than 10,000 clues, 4,800 parolees to check out, and 120,000 fingerprint cards to run for comparison.'
The LAPD had use of a relatively new weapon, a computer into which clues were inputted. But it was haphazardly managed, and investigators scattered among the agencies were not reliably sharing information with one another.
'There was really no coordination whatsoever,' Frank Salerno, one of the top sheriff's detectives on the case, told The Times in a recent interview. 'Investigation by committee doesn't work.'
Since there was widespread suspicion the strangler might be a cop, the LAPD ordered its officers not to chase female suspects. 'If a woman runs from you, we said, don't chase her,' Gates would write. 'Understand that she may be panicking, thinking that you're him.'
Some detectives thought the bodies had been carried to the dump sites by multiple people, since the scenes lacked drag marks. Serial killers almost always worked alone, but there might be 'one homicidal maniac or several,' The Times reported. An LAPD commander said, 'There may be as many as 4 or 5 sets of stranglers.'
With panic pervasive and pressure to close the case mounting, the LAPD arrested a Beverly Hills handyman in connection with the murders — a jailhouse snitch had implicated him — but were forced to release him three days later, accompanied by a humiliating public apology from Gates.
The L.A. killings inexplicably stopped in spring 1978; nearly a year passed without more bodies. Detectives rotated back to their old assignments. Reflecting on his reaction, Salerno said: 'Why did it stop, if there were two? Were both of them in custody? Did one kill the other? Who knows?'
In mid-January 1979, the phone rang at the Sheriff's Department with a call from police in Bellingham, Wash., where 27-year-old Kenneth Bianchi was in custody for the rape and strangling of two local college students. He had been working as a rent-a-cop. The address on his driver's license was 1950 Tamarind Ave. in Hollywood.
Alert L.A. detectives remembered that a Strangler victim, 18-year-old escort Kimberly Martin, had been abducted from that location. Another of Bianchi's former addresses, in Glendale, was an apartment complex where a second victim, a 20-year-old art student named Kristina Weckler, had lived. A third victim had lived across the street.
Bianchi's name, it turned out, had surfaced multiple times during the investigation. At one point, he had even agreed to take a polygraph test. But no one had followed up.
'Our computer software could not collate all the information fed into it, and Bianchi's name was spelled differently each time,' Gates would write, lamenting that he had lacked the time and authority to supervise the case with more granular intensity. 'It continues to haunt me today that I didn't personally go over every detail.'
One of Bianchi's former neighbors remembered him as 'a friendly, well-mannered, nice young man.' When reporters learned his cousin Buono was his suspected accomplice, they drove to Glendale but found him a surly subject.
'You guys blowed up the story too goddam much,' Buono said. 'Goodbye and get off my property.'
A few months later, still free but under tight surveillance, he was ready to share a few bitter thoughts.
'The only thing I have to say is I haven't did nothing,' Buono told reporters. 'They won't find nothing 'cause I ain't did nothing.' He complained that the attention had dried up referrals to his auto upholstery business. 'The phone don't ring any more. Nobody comes in. As a businessman, I'm dead.'
As for his younger cousin? He didn't even know him that well, he insisted. He had let him stay with him briefly as a favor to his aunt, and the association had meant nothing but grief. 'We didn't have nothing in common,' he said. 'Now I wouldn't do no more favors for anybody, even the Pope.'
Up in Washington state, Bianchi had confessed to some of the L.A. murders and implicated his cousin as his partner. There was a bizarre catch, however. Bianchi did so under hypnosis, and convinced more than one psychiatrist that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. To take Bianchi's schtick seriously was to believe an alter ego named 'Steve Walker' had done the crimes, the basis for an insanity defense.
'We're looking at this going, 'Good God, hopefully nobody's believing this crap,'' Peter Finnigan, one of the sheriff's detectives on the case, told The Times recently.
Finnigan said he and his partners soon discovered that Steve Walker was the name of a real psychologist whose credentials Bianchi had stolen to pass himself off as one.
Bianchi had duped the psychologist into sending him his school transcripts by placing an ad in the L.A. Times pretending to seek an associate for a fake therapy practice.
Detectives went hunting for the Help Wanted ad, hunkered over the microfiche machine at the newspaper's downtown office. 'We spent almost two weeks in your damn basement,' Finnigan told The Times.
They found the ad and exposed Bianchi's ruse. 'Basically his multiple personality defense is destroyed,' Finnigan said. 'Because your primary multiple personality isn't yours, it's a real person.'
In no time, Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Washington murders and five of the L.A. murders. He agreed to testify against his cousin. (In a case with no shortage of weirdness, a woman who said she loved Bianchi, Veronica Compton, tried to strangle a cocktail waitress to make it appear the real Strangler was still loose; she went to prison for it.)
At various times, more than a dozen L.A. murders were attributed to the Stranglers, some mistakenly. Los Angeles prosecutors prepared to try Buono for ten of them. But their star witness was increasingly capricious.
Sometimes, Bianchi insisted he and Buono had taken turns strangling victims; other times, he claimed not to have been present at all, or to have watched Buono do it.
It amounted to the 'self-immolation of his own credibility,' said Assistant Dist. Atty. Roger Kelly. He told the press it would be unethical to rely on a witness he considered a liar, bluntly conceding: 'The case is in trouble.'
And so it was no surprise when he announced in July 1981 that his office, under Dist. Atty. John Van De Kamp, was dropping the murder charges against Buono. The office would pursue pimping charges, but even if convicted, at most Buono would get a few years.
Cops were furious. 'Kelly was one of these guys who wanted eyewitnesses,' Finnigan recalled — an area in which the case was flimsy. 'He didn't like circumstantial evidence. He felt there were too many loose ends.'
Gates, in his memoir, derided Kelly as a weak-kneed prosecutor who feared damage to his reputation if he lost on such a large stage, an attorney who preferred 'pat cases, sure things, with all the T's crossed and the I's dotted,' he wrote. 'Sometimes a prosecutor has to take a chance.'
It was Superior Court Judge Ronald George who saved the case. He spent more than an hour reading aloud a scathing 36-page ruling, ordering the district attorney's office to 'vigorously and effectively resume' the prosecution, or else he'd give it to the attorney general's office.
While Bianchi's account was a 'morass of contradictions,' there was nevertheless a great deal of evidence to corroborate his claims, which he said prosecutors had unaccountably 'glossed over.'
For example, there was the account of Catherine Lorre, daughter of the late actor Peter Lorre, who said the cousins had posed as vice cops while trying to abduct her in Hollywood in 1977. And there were polyester fibers on two of the victims matching material found in Buono's shop.
Prosecutors were stunned by George's ruling, and the defense flabbergasted. 'I've been practicing law for 15 years and I've never seen anything like this happen before,' said Gerald Chaleff, one of Buono's attorneys.
It was a decision the judge was proud of, later telling a reporter: 'Ten bodies don't just get swept under the carpet!' In a recent interview, the retired judge — who went on to serve as chief justice of the California Supreme Court for 14 years — told The Times: 'Normally, like most judges, I would not second-guess a prosecutor's evaluation of his or her own case.' But 'I felt I had not only a right, but a duty' to do so.
The attorney general's office prosecuted Buono, which became the longest murder trial in American history — a record that still holds. From jury selection in November 1981 to nine guilty verdicts in November 1983, it ran for 729 days, with 392 witnesses and 1,807 exhibits. Bianchi testified for months, and although his testimony was riddled with contradictions, he supplied details only one of the killers would have known — like the use of cleaning fluid to inject one of the victims. Sentenced to life, Buono died in prison in 2002, at age 67.
For prosecutors who had tried to scuttle a winnable case against a serial killer, the notoriety was unkind. Kelly, a downtown veteran, was transferred against his will to the Compton branch. His former boss, Van De Kamp, carried a political albatross.
'It was an error,' he acknowledged, admitting he had wrongly assessed the strength of the evidence. But Democrat and Republican rivals cudgeled him with it during his failed run for governor in 1990.
Bianchi, now 74, remains locked up and was recently denied parole. Finnigan, the retired detective, attended the virtual hearing and perceived no difference in the 'pathological lying sociopath' he began studying in 1979.
'He's exactly the same,' Finnigan said. 'His mannerisms and his speech patterns, exactly. He's double slick.'