Hillside Strangler
Hillside Strangler | |
|---|---|
| Born | Angelo Buono Kenneth Bianchi |
| Cause of death | heart attack (A.B.) |
| Criminal penalty | life imprisonment |
| Details | |
| Victims | ten confirmed |
Span of crimes | 1977–1978 |
| Country | USA |
| State(s) | California |
Date apprehended | 1978 |
The Hillside Strangler is the media epithet for two men, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, cousins who were convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and killing girls and women ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old during a four-month period from late 1977 to early 1978. They committed their crimes in the hills above Los Angeles, California.
Murders
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The first victim of the Hillside Stranglers was a Hollywood prostitute identified as Yolanda Washington, whose body was found near the Forest Lawn Cemetery on October 18, 1977. The corpse was cleaned and faint marks were visible around the neck, wrists, and ankles where a rope had been used. She had been viciously raped.
On October 31, 1977, police were called to an Eagle Rock neighborhood, north of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl, wrapped in a tarp, had been found on a curb in a residential area. Bruises on her neck indicated strangulation. The body had been dumped, indicating she was killed elsewhere. The girl was eventually identified as Judith Miller, a 16-year-old destitute.
On November 6, 1977, the nude body of another woman was found near the Glendale Country Club. Similar to Judy Miller, she had been strangled with a ligature. The woman was identified as 21 year old Lissa Kastin, a waitress, and was last seen leaving work the night before she was discovered.
On November 13, 1977, two school girls, Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, boarded a bus and headed home. They were last seen getting off a bus and approaching a car. Inside the car reportedly were two men. On November 20, a young boy cleaning up a trash-strewn hillside near Dodger Stadium found two bodies. Both girls had been strangled and raped, and were identified as Cepeda and Johnson.
Later that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the nude, sexually assaulted body of Kristina Weckler, 20, on a hillside near Glendale. Unlike previous victims, there were signs of torture, indicated by oozing injection marks.
On November 23, the badly decomposed body of Jane King, 28, was found near an off ramp of the Golden State freeway. She had gone missing around November 9. With the continued discovery of bodies in hilly areas, a task force was formed to catch the predator, dubbed the "Hillside Strangler."
On November 29, police found the body of Lauren Wagner, 18. She also had been strangled with a ligature. There were also burn marks on her hands indicating she was tortured. The law enforcement task force — Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Glendale Police Department — began to assume that more than one person was responsible for the murders, even though the media continued to use the singular, Hillside Strangler.
On December 13, 1977, police found the body of 17-year-old prostitute Kimberly Martin on a hillside.
The final victim in Los Angeles was discovered on February 16, 1978, when a helicopter spotted an orange Datsun abandoned off a cliff in the Angeles Crest area. Police responded to the scene and found the body of the car's owner, 20-year-old Cindy Hudspeth, in the trunk.
The Stranglers had stopped Catherine Lorre with the intent of abducting her, but after learning that she was the daughter of actor Peter Lorre, who was famous for portraying a serial killer in Fritz Lang´s movie M, they let her go. It was only after the two men were arrested that Lorre realized whom she had met.
Trial
After intensive investigation, police charged cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr. with the crimes. Bianchi had fled to Washington where he was soon arrested 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 one of his multiple personalities committed the murders while he was in an altered, unconscious state. Court psychologists, notably Dr. Martin Orne, observed Bianchi and found that he was faking the illness, 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 (now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California) said he would impose the death penalty without a second thought if the jury had allowed it. Bianchi is serving a life sentence in Washington. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, in Calipatria State Prison where he was serving a life sentence.
Films
The murders were the basis of the 2004 film The Hillside Strangler and Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders (2006). They were also the basis of the 1989 teleplay The Case of the Hillside Stranglers starring a young Billy Zane as Kenneth Bianchi and Dennis Farina as Angelo Buono.
External links
- Hillside Strangler' dies in prison CNN September 22, 2002
- Crime Library's story on the Hillside Stranglers
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