Kenneth Bianchi and The Hillside Strangler
Kenneth Bianchi and The Hillside StranglerIt takes more than a few homicides to get the attention of the people in a city the size of Los Angeles. Murders are a daily occurrence, particularly when one involves a person living in a high-risk lifestyle, like a prostitute. So when three women were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of the city between October and early November of 1977, very few people lost sleep over it. Only a couple sharp homicide detectives got nervous that this was just the beginning.
Everything changed Thanksgiving week when five young women and girls were found on hillsides in the Glendale-Highland Park area. These five young women – one of which was twelve, another only fourteen – were not prostitutes, but “nice girls” who had been abducted from their middle-class neighborhoods.
Newspapers and television stations talked of rape, torture, abduction and murder. The collective consciousness of a populace numbed by violence was suddenly and unpleasantly engaged. The city went into a panic.
The term “Hillside Strangler” was coined by the media, even though police were convinced that there was more than one person involved. People did what they always do in a panic: they warn their children to be careful; buy large dogs; install new locks on their doors; take self-defense classes; carry guns and knives to protect themselves.
None of this seemed to work, however, since the stranglers still did not have any problems getting new victims. On Sunday, November 20, 1977, LAPD Homicide Detective Sergeant Bob Grogan was hoping to be able to enjoy his day off when he was called to an obscure area in the hills between Glendale and Eagle Rock. As he tried with difficulty to locate the site, he thought to himself that whoever was using this area to dump bodies must be very familiar with the neighborhood to even know this place existed.
immediately noticed the ligature marks on her wrists, ankles and neck. When he turned her over, blood oozed from her rectum. The bruises on her breasts were obvious. Oddly enough, there were two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that indicate a drug addict.
As Grogan examined the scene, he saw no indication of any disturbance in the foliage nor any sign that the body had been dragged there. He made a mental note to himself that the murder occurred somewhere else and a man, maybe two men, had carried her body and dumped it there in the grass.
A few hours later that afternoon, Grogan’s partner, Dudley Varney, had been called to investigate two homicides on the other side of that same hilly area. The two dead girls had been found by a nine-year-old boy who had treasure hunting in a trash heap on the hillside. It was a pretty horrible sight, made all the more grotesque by the decay and army of insects that had taken over the flesh.
Again, there was no indication that the murders had occurred where the bodies were found, nor was their any evidence that the bodies had been dragged there. Small as the young girls were, there was the probability that more than one killer was involved in dumping their bodies on the hillside.
It did not take long to identify the girls as Dolores Cepeda, twelve, and Sonja Johnson, fourteen, both of whom had been missing for about a week from St. Ignatius School. The girls had been last seen getting off a bus and going over to a large two-tone sedan to talk to someone on the passenger side. A person on the passenger side corroborated the theory that there were two killers, probably both men.
The next day, the first girl that Bob Grogan investigated was identified as Kristina Weckler, a quiet twenty-year-old honors student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design. As he searched her apartment at 809 East Garfield Avenue in Glendale, Grogan was overcome by sadness and, then, rage. Her effects and her diary showed her to be a loving and serious young woman who should have had a bright future ahead of her. He could not help but think fearfully of his own teenage daughter. When Kristina’s devastated parents came from San Francisco to pick up her belongings, Grogan pledged to them that he would find her killer or killers.
On November 23, the day before Thanksgiving, another young woman’s body was found, this time near the Los Feliz off ramp of the Golden State Freeway. Her maggot-covered body was estimated to have been there some two weeks. She had been strangled like the others, but it was not certain if she had been raped.
Some two weeks earlier, the young woman had been a vibrant and attractive blonde with a figure like a model. Jane King was twenty-eight at the time she was murdered.
The authorities lost no time in creating a task force, initially composed of thirty officers from LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department and the Glendale Police Department. Like every other task force formed in a high-profile case, the officers were soon overwhelmed with worthless tips and suggestions from well-meaning citizens.
The killers took the holiday weekend off, but that was all. On Tuesday, November 29, Grogan was called to the hills around Glendale’s Mount Washington area. The naked body of a young woman was found lying partially in the street. The ligature marks on her ankles, wrists and neck were the Hillside Strangler’s calling card.
But something was different: it looked as though she had burns on her palms. Like the strange puncture marks on Kristina Weckler’s arms, it looked as though the killers were experimenting – possibly with methods of torture. There was also something else that was different – a shiny track of some sticky liquid, which had attracted a convoy of ants. If this substance was semen or saliva, there was the possibility that the killer’s blood type could be determined. Tests on semen found in the earlier victims had revealed nothing.
That same day, the young woman was identified as Lauren Wagner, an eighteen-year-old student who lived with her parents in the San Fernando Valley. Her parents had gone to bed the previous night, expecting her to come home before midnight. The next morning, they found her car parked across the street with the door ajar. When Lauren’s father questioned the neighbors, he found that the woman who lived in the house where Lauren’s car had been parked saw her abduction. Beulah Stofer, the neighbor, said that she had seen Lauren pull over to the curb around nine o’clock in the evening.
Two men had pulled their car beside hers. There was some kind of disagreement and Lauren ended up in the car with the two men.
Grogan went to talk to Beulah immediately. Her Doberman barked furiously at him as he went to her door. Beulah was a bespectacled asthmatic in her late fifties and almost at the point of nervous collapse. She had just had a phone call from a man with a New York accent.
“You the lady with the dog?” he asked her. When she said that she had a dog, he told her to keep her mouth shut about what she had witnessed or he would kill her. Beulah did not realize that Lauren had been abducted. She thought that she had just witnessed a quarrel and she wasn’t even sure it had been Lauren.
Beulah described the killers’ car as a large dark car with a white top. One of the men had dragged Lauren from her car into his. She heard Lauren cry out, “You won’t get away with this!”
Beulah was so terrified by the incident that she did not even tell her husband who had been home the whole time. The horror of the whole thing had thrown her into a violent asthma attack.
She was sure that there were two men: one was tall and young with acne scars; the other one was Latin-looking, older and shorter with bushy hair. She was certain that she could identify them again.
Even though Beulah claimed that she was standing at her window when Lauren was attacked, her descriptions of the men were too vivid to have been seen at such a distance. The window was a good thirty feet from the street. Grogan was sure that Beulah had really been out in her front yard and hid in the bushes when the commotion began. Otherwise, with her dog barking the whole time, she never could have heard Lauren tell her captors that they would never get away with it. Perhaps, Beulah would tell the whole truth when it and if it became necessary.
Now with the abduction of Lauren Wagner, the killers saw the whole city as their cruising ground. Nowhere was safe. At least when the crimes were confined to Hollywood and Glendale, police could intensify their efforts in those areas. Now, it was a crapshoot. Nobody knew where the stranglers would strike the next time.
The rampage of Thanksgiving week threw into the spotlight three earlier murders of prostitutes or suspected prostitutes, beginning in October. On October 17, 1977, a tall, leggy prostitute of African-American descent called Yolanda Washington was raped and strangled. Her nude body was dumped near the Forest Lawn Cemetery. Almost two weeks later, Sergeant Frank Salerno, a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, was called to the town of La Crescenta, north of the Glendale area to investigate the homicide of a woman. It was a pretty grim sight for that Halloween morning of 1977.
The naked body of the woman lay close to the curb in a middle-class residential area, covered with a tarp by the property owner so as to shield the body from the children in the neighborhood. The bruises on her neck showed that she had been strangled. She had ligature marks on both wrists and ankles as well as her neck. Insects feasted on her pale skin. On her eyelid was small piece of light-colored fluff that Salerno saved for the forensic experts. It did not appear that she had been murdered there in La Crescenta.The body was placed deliberately where it would be found quickly. As though it was a nasty wake-up call to that respectable middle-class neighborhood. There was no indication that the victim had been dragged to the spot where she lay, so Salerno theorized that she had been carried from a car, possibly by more than one person.She was small and thin, weighing about ninety pounds and appeared to be about sixteen years old. Her hair was reddish brown and was medium length. The coroner determined that she had been strangled to death around midnight, some six hours or so before she was found Halloween morning. It was also clear that she had been raped and sodomized.After a couple of days, she still didn’t match any missing person’s report. Salerno persuaded the newspapers to run a small story on her, along with a sketch and a request to contact the police if anyone recognized her. Still no one came forward to identify her.Salerno took to the streets around Hollywood Boulevard, which was a mecca for runaways, addicts, prostitutes and the homeless. With her sketch in hand, he showed it to hundreds of street people. The name Judy Miller kept surfacing as a young destitute whore. A man named Markust Camden, who described himself as a bounty hunter, said he saw Judy Miller leave the Fish and Chips restaurant at nine p.m. on the evening before she was found dead. The prospects for solving this particular homicide were not promising. Salerno’s only other clue, the little piece of fluff that he found on the victim’s eyelid, could not be identified.A week later, on the morning of Sunday, November 6, 1977, the naked body of another strangulation victim was found in Glendale near a country club. Salerno talked to the Glendale police and recognized the similarities between the two victims. Both had been strangled by ligature and their bodies had been dumped within six or so miles of one another. Both girls had the same five-point ligature marks (ankles, wrists, and neck). There was evidence of rape, but not sodomy, in the newest victim.Looking at the scene where the body had been deposited, Salerno was certain that at least two men were involved. There was a sizeable guardrail between the road and the spot where the body lay. It would have taken two men to lift the stocky victim over the guardrail.This victim quickly had a name. She was Lissa Kastin, a twenty-one-year-old waitress at the Healthfaire Restaurant near Hollywood and Vine. She lived just off Hollywood Boulevard. She had made a comment to her mother than she was thinking of turning to prostitution to earn some extra money. Lissa had last been seen leaving the Healthfaire Restaurant just after nine o’clock on the night she was murdered.Eventually, Salerno tracked down the Miller family and got a positive identification on the first victim. The family was down on its luck and had nothing to contribute about their daughter’s friends. ____________________Until Thanksgiving week, only Frank Salerno of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department had known that a serial killer was at work. After Thanksgiving week, it was the top priority for the entire law enforcement community of Los Angeles. Eight victims in the space of two months. The investigation went into high gear, but the killer or killers took a couple of weeks off.In mid-December, police were called to a vacant lot on a steep hillside on Alvarado Street where they found the body of Kimberly Diane Martin, a tall, blonde call-girl who had been working for the Climax “modeling agency.”This time the police department had what seemed like two reasonably good leads. Kimberly Martin’s last client had beckoned her to Apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind, which turned out to be a vacant apartment. The murderer had called from a pay phone in the lobby of the Hollywood Public Library on Ivar Street. Unfortunately, nothing much came from these leads and the police did not have any immediate arrests. But things became quiet for awhile. There were no more victims in December or January. Then in mid-February, there was another victim. On Thursday, February 16, an attractive young women named Cindy Hudspeth was murdered. Her strangled, violated body was put into the trunk of her Datsun and was pushed off a cliff on Angeles Crest.The next day when the police investigated, it was clear from the ligature marks that the Hillside Strangler was at work once again. Police focused on the details of Cindy’s life in the hopes that they could determine who was with her when she disappeared.
Cindy had been a twenty-year-old clerk that everybody liked. She hoped to make enough money to go to college one day and planned to give dancing lessons to help raise the money. A vivacious young woman, she had won several dance contests. She had been last seen in her apartment building at 800 East Garfield Avenue. She had probably been headed toward Glendale Community College, where she worked nights answering the phone. Between her apartment building and the community college, Cindy had been kidnapped in the late afternoon.Cindy Hudspeth had lived across the street from another victim, Kristina Weckler, even though the two women did not know each other. Detectives Bob Grogan and Frank Salerno both believed that there was a good chance that at least one of the killers lived in Glendale.
The relationship between the LAPD and the LA Sheriff’s Department had been notoriously bad for many, many years. Petty squabbles, jealousies, jurisdictional and territorial issues limited cooperation among the members of these two key law enforcement agencies and were a boon to criminals who took advantage of that situation. However, in this particular case, the two key investigators — Frank Salerno of the Sheriff’s department and Bob Grogan of LAPD — worked well together and made a point of ensuring that information was shared between both large law enforcement organizations.
Despite this harmony, the investigation was going nowhere. The few clues they had produced no good suspects. They knew the kind of person they were looking for, but that wasn’t much help in a huge metropolitan area. Darcy O’Brien in his excellent book, Two of a Kind, summarizes what the forensic psychiatrists had to say: “The Strangler was white, in his late twenties or early thirties, and single, separated, or divorced — in any case not living with a woman. He was of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a job too long. He had probably been in trouble with the law before. He was passive, cold, and manipulative — all at once. He was the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and brutality, particularly at the hands of women.” Armed with that information, Grogan said: “Gee, all we got to do now is find a white male who hates his mother.”
One unusual twist to the investigation was the arrival in L.A. of a psychic from Berlin. Grogan was polite, but unenthusiastic when the psychic wrote in German what they should be looking for:
Two Italians
Brothers
Aged about thirty-five
Months passed and the Hillside Strangler seemed to have retired. The activities of the task force wound down and detectives began to work on other cases.
____________________
On January 12, 1979, the police in Bellingham, Washington were told that two Western Washington University students were missing. The two women roommates, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were not the type of people to take off irresponsibly without telling anyone. When Karen didn’t show up for work, her boss became worried. He remembered that she had accepted a house-sitting job in a very wealthy Bayside neighborhood from a security guard friend of hers.
Bellingham police contacted the security firm, who in turn called the security guard to ask him about the supposed house-sitting job for one of the company’s clients. The security guard claimed he knew nothing about it and had never heard of the two missing women. The security guard told his employer that he had been at a Sheriff’s Reserve meeting the night the two women disappeared.
When police found out that the security guard was not at the Sheriff’s Reserve meeting as he had told his employer, they decided to contact the security guard directly. They found him to be a friendly young man who had skipped the Sheriff’s meeting because it was on first aid, which he already knew.
The police had no indication that the two women had met with foul play. It was very possible that they had just gone away for the weekend and had forgotten to tell Karen’s employer. However, Terry Mangan, the former priest who was the new Bellingham police chief, was not comfortable with that explanation.
When he visited the girls’ home, he found a hungry cat — an unusual situation for an otherwise very pampered pet. In their home, he found the address of the Bayside home where the two of them were to house-sit. A close look at the records of the security firm brought up the name of that same security guard in conjunction with the address in which the girls were to house-sit.
Also, police learned that the security guard had used a company truck the night the women disappeared, supposedly take it into the shop for repair. However, the guard never took the truck in for servicing.
Chief Mangan was becoming increasingly concerned about the safety of the two missing women. He asked the Highway Patrol to check on sites that might be used to dump bodies or abandon cars. “I think we have to consider this a kidnapping and maybe a homicide.”
The next step was for the police to search the Bayside address where the girls were supposed to house-sit. They found a wet footprint in the kitchen that had been left a few hours earlier, but there was no sign of the girls or Karen Mandic’s car.
Police found a neighbor who had been contacted by a security guard and asked to check on the house each day except for the night that the girls disappeared. That night, the guard told her, there was special work being done to the alarm system and he didn’t want her to be taken as an intruder.
Next, Chief Mangan enlisted the help of the news media, requesting that they describe the missing women and car to their audiences. Shortly thereafter, a woman called about a car that had been abandoned near her home in a heavily wooded area.
Inside the car were the bodies of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Both had been strangled. Other bruises suggested that they had been subjected to other injuries as well.
While the missing women were sent to the morgue, Chief Mangan ordered that the security guard be picked up for questioning. They needed to proceed cautiously since this suspect was a trained security officer. As it turned out, the security guard gave them no trouble whatsoever when they picked him up.
He was a handsome, friendly, intelligent and articulate husband and father by the name of Kenneth Bianchi.
Kenny
Kenneth Bianchi was almost six feet tall and was a trim, muscular man. His dark hair was well groomed and he wore a moustache. He lived with a long-time girlfriend, named Kelli Boyd, and their infant son. Kelli could not believe that someone as kind and gentle as Kenny could be a suspect in a murder case. Nor could Kenny’s employer, who considered him a valuable and responsible member of his staff. The Bellingham police mounted a first class investigation of all the forensic evidence. They were exceptionally thorough in the handling of every hair and fiber. Pubic hairs fell from Diane Wilder’s body as they lifted it from Karen’s car. The Bellingham police had a white sheet ready to catch any stray, unattached fibers or hairs than could have easily slipped away.
More pubic hairs were found on the steps at the Bayside home. Fibers from the carpets of that home matched the fibers found on the dead girls’ shoes and clothes. Would these hairs and fibers conclusively link Kenny to the murdered girls? The answer would take several days to determine.Meanwhile, the police wanted to keep Kenny under lock and key. This was made easier when they found stolen goods in his home — items stolen from job sites he had been managing. Chief Mangan remembered the Hillside Strangler case in Los Angeles. Since Kenny had lived in L.A. before he had come to Bellingham, Mangan had calls placed to the police in L.A. and Glendale and to the L.A. Sheriff’s Office.Detective Frank Salerno responded to the Bellingham police call. Suddenly everything made sense to Salerno. The addresses of Cindy Hudspeth and Kristina Weckler on East Garfield and the client Kimberly Martin visited on Tamarind matched Kenny’s places of residence during the times of the murders. He lost no time getting to Bellingham to assist the police there in the investigation. He left his partner, Peter Finnigan, to work with Grogan and others on uncovering Bianchi’s activities when he lived in L.A. Piece by piece, the evidence mounted that Kenny Bianchi was at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. The jewelry that was found in Bianchi’s home matched the description of jewelry that was worn by two of the victims: Kimberly Martin’s ramshorn necklace and Yolanda Washington’s turquoise ring. And the hair and fiber evidence further substantiated his guilt.____________________ Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born May 22, 1951 in Rochester, New York. His biological mother was an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up at birth. Three months later, Frances Bianchi and her husband, a manual laborer in the American Brake-Shoe foundry, adopted him. Darcy O’Brien describes him as a born loser: “Kenny appears to have arisen from the cradle dissembling. By the time he could talk, Frances knew she was coping with a compulsive liar, and his childhood unfolded as one of idleness and goldbricking. When he was five and a half, Frances became worried by his frequent lapses into trancelike states of daydreaming; she consulted a physician. The doctor, hearing that little Kenny’s eyeballs would roll back into his head during these trances, reached a diagnosis of petit mal seizures. But they were nothing to worry about. He would grow out of them.”Despite his IQ of 116 and artistic and verbal gifts, he was a chronic underachiever and his grades were erratic. He was prone to temper tantrums and was quick to anger. Frances took him to a psychologist, who decided that Kenny was overly dependent upon his mother.With significant financial sacrifice, she sent him to a Catholic elementary school where he did well in creative writing. Mr. Bianchi died of a heart attack when Kenny was thirteen and Frances had to go to work to support the two of them. Kenny went to a public high school where he was polite and neat, avoiding all of the social turmoil that caught up so many young people in the late 1960’s.”Bianchi set high standards for his women, which they repeatedly failed to meet. His Catholic education served him here in a twisted way. He was able to confuse ordinary women with the Virgin and could be moved to bitter disappointment, even anger and fury, at their human frailties. Denying female sexuality even as he was attracted to it, he objected to V-neck sweaters and tight jeans and asked absolute fidelity in return for outwardly absolute devotion. Yet he always dated several girls at once and did not require of himself comparable standards of purity.” (O’Brien)He married a young woman his age when he graduated from high school in 1971, but neither of them was mature enough to make the marriage last. Eight months into the marriage, she packed up all of their goods, left him and filed for an annulment. Kenny was crushed. He felt betrayed and used.When he got over the pain, he started going to a community college to take courses in police science and psychology, but did not do particularly well and finally dropped out. He was rejected when he applied for a job in the sheriff’s department. He drifted into a job as a security guard, which allowed him to steal things, which he then gave to his girlfriends. The stealing caused him to change jobs a number of times and he realized that he wasn’t going anywhere in Rochester.Kenny left Rochester in late 1975 when he was twenty-six and went to live in Los Angeles. He started out living with his older cousin, Angelo Buono. At first he was seduced by the uninhibited California culture where sex and drugs were freely available. Eventually, he got tired of that and started to settle down.His first love was police work, but there were no openings available in the Los Angles Police Department and the Glendale Police Department turned him down. Eventually, he got a job working for a title company and used his first paycheck to get an apartment at 809 East Garfield Avenue in Glendale and a 1972 Cadillac sedan, overextending himself financially in the process. Kenny was never strong on financial responsibility.There were a number of young women who lived in his apartment building. One of them, Kristina Weckler, tried to ignore his advances, but others were more receptive. He moved in with Kelli Boyd, a woman he had met at work. In May of 1977, she told him she was expecting his child.He wanted to marry Kelli, but she was not sure that she wanted to accept the offer. While Kenny was very kind to her, he had some serious faults. He was very jealous, he was immature and he lied. Kenny lost his job over some pot that was found in his desk, but he was able to get another similar job in downtown L.A. He and Kelli moved to an apartment at 1950 Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood.As a sideline, Kenny had set himself up as a psychologist with a phony degree and set of credentials that he had fraudulently obtained. He rented some office space from an unsuspecting legitimate psychologist. Fortunately, very few people came to see him for help. When Kelli found out about the counseling service, she was angry.During October and December of 1977, the city of Los Angeles was panicked by news of the Hillside Strangler, but this had little effect on the relationship of Kelli and Kenny. When Kenny started coughing and having difficulty breathing, Kelli insisted that he go to a doctor. He told her that he had lung cancer and was going to have to take radiation and chemotherapy to save his life. It was a lie.Kelli was traumatized by the news, but did her best to keep his spirits up. Kenny started to miss work because he claimed that the therapy was making him ill. One day when he was home sick from work, detectives came to question him about one of the Strangler murders that may have taken place in his apartment building. The detectives were favorably impressed with Bianchi and did not consider him a suspect.Ken asked to participate in LAPD’s ride-along program, which let civilians go along in patrol cars as a kind of community education program. Ken did nothing but talk about the Strangler murders.The relationship between Kenny and Kelli became tense. She would often go to stay with her brother, but would always go back to Kenny. In February, their son Sean was born. For awhile, things were better between them, but the old problems surfaced once again.Ted Schwartz in The Hillside Strangler summarizes how Kelli viewed the difficulties: “Ken was irresponsible about work and about money. He would goof off, going over to play cards with Angelo after calling in sick. He owned a used Cadillac, then couldn’t make the payments. She had hoped that the baby would cause him to have a sense of purpose, to encourage him to change his ways, but it didn’t.”Perhaps Los Angeles was the problem. Everything was a hustle. People had no depth, no values, no integrity. Ken did. He was a very moral man, yet he was young and easily influenced by others. He desperately wanted approval, and apparently he didn’t get it from just doing his job and following the work ethic. Whatever the case, Kelli realized that they were finished in that city.”Kelli went back home to Bellingham to start over. Her parents and old friends were there to help. Ken was devastated by the decision. Once again, his woman abandoned him. Once she was gone, he wrote to her constantly. Finally, she agreed to give him another chance and he drove to Bellingham in May of 1978. The police in Los Angeles released a photo of Bianchi to the news media and received a call from a lawyer named David Wood. Wood had rescued one of two girls, Becky Spears and Sabra Hannan, from Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono who had forced the young women into prostitution by threats and brutality. While Salerno was in Bellingham, Grogan and Salerno’s partner, Pete Finnigan, went to have a little chat with Angelo Buono. Buono was an ugly man in his forties with dyed black hair, poor teeth and a nose that dominated his face. The detectives had a strong hunch that this Angelo character was the other Hillside Strangler.