Hillside Strangler

The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later discovered to be two, American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles, California, between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered on the wooded hillsides surrounding the city. The perpetrators were identified as cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr.

All except one of the murders were committed in Buono's upholstery shop in Glendale, California. The victims, who ranged in age from 12 to 28, were raped, sodomized, beaten, and sometimes tortured, before being strangled to death with ligature. Their corpses were then cleaned and dumped naked across wooded hillsides in Los Angeles. Buono and Bianchi impersonated police officers to lure their victims from nearby locales, then drove them to Buono's upholstery shop to be raped and killed.

The murders began with the deaths of two prostitutes who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles in October and November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not prostitutes, but those who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to prominence. The murders caused a moral panic among young women who were terrified to go out after dark, as well as being pulled over by police. There were two more deaths in December 1977 and February 1978 before the murders abruptly stopped. An extensive investigation proved fruitless until Bianchi's arrest in January 1979 for the rapes and murders of two more young women in Bellingham, Washington, and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case.

In order to avoid the death penalty, Bianchi named Buono as the other perpetrator of the Hillside Strangler killings and agreed to testify against him, leading to Buono's arrest in October 1979. Bianchi pleaded guilty to five of the murders, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole, two consecutive terms for the Washington murders and five concurrent terms for the California murders. Bianchi is currently serving his sentence at Washington State Penitentiary and was denied parole twice in 2010 and 2025, respectively. Buono pleaded not guilty and was convicted of nine of the murders in November 1983 before being sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in January 1984. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, at age 67 while serving his sentence at Calipatria State Prison.

Background

right|thumb | Kenneth Bianchi mugshot in 1979

left|thumb | upright | Angelo Buono mugshot

In January 1976, Kenneth Bianchi left Rochester, New York, and moved to Los Angeles, California, to live with his cousin Angelo Buono Jr. Buono provided a strong role model for the docile Bianchi. When Bianchi was short of money, Buono came up with the idea of getting some girls to work for them as prostitutes. Two teenage runaways, Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears, met Bianchi and Buono, and once under their control, were forced to prostitute themselves. Eventually, Spears happened to meet lawyer David Wood, who was appalled at her situation and arranged for her to escape from the city. a community 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found naked, face up on a parkway in a middle-class residential area. The homeowner had covered her with tarp in the early morning hours to prevent the neighborhood children from viewing her on their way to school. Ligature marks were on her neck, wrists, and ankles, indicating to police she was bound and strangled. The body had been dumped, indicating she was killed elsewhere.

In addition to working full-time, Kastin was also a professional dancer in the all-female dance and cabaret troupe The L.A. Knockers and, unlike the previous two victims, was not a prostitute, drug user, or runaway. The stranglers followed Kastin after she was seen driving home from work, pulled her over on the street she lived on, presented a fake "police badge", and told her that they were detectives. They then handcuffed her and told her they needed to take her in for questioning. the two men approached 24-year-old Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of actor Peter Lorre — famous for his role as a serial killer in Fritz Lang's film M — with the intent of abducting and killing her. However, when Lorre produced not only her driver's license when requested, but also a picture of her sitting on her father's lap as a child, the two let her go without incident, fearing the murder of a celebrity's child would attract an unusually high amount of police and press attention.

Lorre did not realize who the men were until they were arrested, at which point she recalled that two men flashing police badges had approached her in the past.

210px|right|thumb|Dolores Cepeda (left) and Sonja Johnson

Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson

On Sunday, November 13, 1977, two girls, 12-year-old Dolores Ann "Dolly" Cepeda and 14-year-old Sonja Marie Johnson, boarded an RTD bus in front of the Eagle Rock Plaza on Colorado Boulevard and headed home. The last time they were seen was getting off the bus on York Boulevard and North Avenue 46, and approaching a two-tone sedan that reportedly had two men inside. Their corpses were discovered by a 9-year-old boy who was treasure-hunting in a trash heap on a hillside near Dodger Stadium on November 20, 1977. Both of the girls' bodies had already begun to decompose and it was determined that they had been strangled and raped. it was later determined that Weckler had been injected with Windex, a common ammonia-based window, glass and hard-surface cleaner. near the Los Feliz Boulevard off-ramp of the Golden State Freeway. Lauren's parents had expected her to come home before midnight, and the next morning, when they found her car parked across the street with the door ajar, her father questioned the neighbors.

Cindy Hudspeth

The body of the final Hillside Strangler victim, 20-year-old Cindy Lee Hudspeth, a student and part-time waitress, was discovered in Los Angeles on February 17, 1978, when a helicopter pilot spotted an orange Datsun abandoned midway down a cliff on the Angeles Crest Highway.

Investigation and trial

In January 1979, after an intense investigation, police charged Bianchi and Buono with the crimes. Bianchi had fled to Bellingham, Washington, where he was soon arrested by Bellingham Police Department for raping and murdering two women he had lured to a home for a house-sitting job. Bianchi attempted to set up an insanity defense, claiming that he had dissociative identity disorder and that a personality separate from himself committed the murders. Court psychologists, notably Dr. Martin Orne, observed Bianchi and found that he was faking, so Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against Buono in exchange for leniency.

At the conclusion of Buono's trial in 1983, Presiding Judge Ronald M. George, who later became Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, stated during sentencing, "I would not have the slightest reluctance to impose the death penalty in this case were it within my power to do so. Ironically, although these two defendants utilized almost every form of legalized execution against their victims, the defendants have escaped any form of capital punishment." Bianchi is serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, at Calipatria State Prison in California, where he was serving a life sentence.

Veronica Compton

In 1980, Bianchi began a relationship with Veronica Compton. During his trial, she testified for the defense. While incarcerated, Bianchi had smuggled a semen filled condom to her in the spine of a book, so she could use it to stage a rape/murder committed by the Hillside Strangler. She was later convicted and imprisoned for attempting to strangle a woman she had lured to a motel in an attempt to have authorities believe that the Hillside Strangler was still on the loose and the wrong man was imprisoned. She was released in 2003.

Media

Film adaptations

{| class="wikitable"

!rowspan=2| Year

!rowspan=2| Title

!colspan=3| Cast

!rowspan=2| Notes

! as Angelo Buono

! as Kenneth Bianchi

! also starring

| 1989

| The Case of the Hillside Stranglers

| Dennis Farina

| Billy Zane

| Richard Crenna as Police Sergeant Bob Grogan

| Made for television; based on Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien

| 2001

| The Hillside Stranglers

| Ron Gilbert

| Jeff Marchelletta

| Made for television; also known as Supersleuth

| 2004

| The Hillside Strangler

| Nicholas Turturro

| C. Thomas Howell

| Marisol Padilla Sánchez as Christina Chavez (based on Veronica Compton)

| 2006

| Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders

| Tomas Arana

| Clifton Collins Jr.

| Brittany Daniel as a psychiatrist

| Direct-to-video

References

Cited works and further reading

External links

"'Hillside Strangler' dies in prison", CNN, September 22, 2002
Crime Library's story on the Hillside Stranglers