Couples Who Kill (5 page)

By the time that his stepdaughter was fourteen, Angelo was openly fondling the girl and saying that she needed breaking in. (He’d later tell a friend that he had full sex with her.) It was the last straw for Nanette and she left the house forever, taking her desperately unhappy children to Florida.

After a year of dating numerous young women, Angelo married again, this time in Las Vegas. The marriage seems to have been for fun or for convenience because he didn’t ever live with Debbie, his newest bride. During these sexually intense years, Angelo Buono was working as hard as he played, building a reputation as a first class auto upholsterer. He was so adept at reupholstering classic cars that some Hollywood stars brought their treasured antique vehicles to him.

By 1975 he was able to open his own upholstery shop and it was soon thriving. So was his sex life. By now Angelo was forty but was sleeping with girls as young as thirteen. He impregnated some of these girls then arranged for them to have abortions. His trail of misery spread and spread.

But despite his bravado, he was very unhappy deep down. He developed a stomach ulcer for which he had to take regular medication. He tried to fill the lack of love in his life by adopting a stray dog and keeping rabbits and an aquarium of tropical fish. He refused to touch alcohol because he
feared anything that would make him lose control.

He was still having a love-hate relationship with his mother, bringing black girlfriends to her house because he knew she was racist. One day she told him that she’d been in touch with her sister, Frances, and that his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, was coming to Glendale to stay with him for a while.

Many writers have given the impression that Kenneth Bianchi only became violent after moving in with Angelo Buono – but in truth most killers start with smaller destructive acts and Kenneth Bianchi was no different. In his late teens he had visited a girlfriend who refused to open the door to him, so he smashed her window and climbed through it, at which point she fled and called the police. But he was so contrite that she dropped the charges, though she refused his proposal of marriage, noting that he was immature. Bianchi was also violent to at least one stranger for, when he was working as a bouncer, he hit a man with far more force than necessary.

He may even have committed three rape-murders when he was aged twenty-one and twenty-two. Leastways, he told a girlfriend that he was responsible for the strangulation deaths of three girls which took place between 16th November 1971 and 26th November 1973. These were known as the Alphabet Murders because the victims’ first and last names both began with the same letter – Carmen Colon age ten, Wanda Walkowicz and Michelle Maenza, both age eleven. Bianchi remains a suspect to this day.

Now that he was living away from home, Kenneth Bianchi was able to enjoy some of the young girls who flocked to Angelo’s apartment. But he had great emotional difficulties with these relationships as he’d been told throughout his childhood that women were either virgins or whores. On the one hand he desired the girls in their tiny shorts and halter neck tops, but when he started dating them he insisted they cover up with baggy sweaters and long skirts. He was also pathologically jealous and would fly into a rage at a party if they even danced with someone else. The weeks passed with Angelo continuing to brutalise his girlfriends and Ken increasingly joining in. The rage that he’d suppressed throughout his unhappy childhood was now coming to the surface – and someone had to pay.

He was still having a love-hate relationship with women when he met Kelli. She was somewhat plump and tended to dress conservatively. She loved to read and fitted his image of a good girl, but she invited him to stay overnight at her house very early in the relationship, something which confused him – and shortly afterwards he realised that she’d given him venereal disease. Kelli explained that she’d been raped shortly before meeting him and must have caught the disease as a result of this. Kenneth Bianchi was still coming to terms with this news when Kelli found that she was expecting his child. Meanwhile his cousin Angelo derided Kelli as ‘that fat chick’ and encouraged Ken to experiment with other girls.

Angelo had already been prostituting some of his girlfriends but now he decided to make it into a more formal arrangement. He took in two young girls, beat and raped them repeatedly and sent them out to men who he met through his garage work. Keen to expand the business, Angelo bought a list of men who wanted a girl sent over to their homes, but when he got in touch with these men he found that they all wanted to visit a girl. As he couldn’t have men turning up at his house at all hours, he’d essentially been sold a useless list. And it was a prostitute who’d sold him that list…

Angelo became further enraged when both of his callgirls escaped. He declared that he wanted to kill a prostitute. It might have been mere bravado, a way of saving face – but Ken egged him on.

Ken’s own life was still in freefall at this time. He’d been turned down twice by the police department and earned so little at various menial jobs that his mother had to send him money. He had begun to beat and sodomise Angelo’s many girlfriends as a way of assuaging his rage. In July he had gotten his own apartment but when he asked his next door neighbour Kristina Weckler out she sensibly turned him down. Later she would meet a hideous death at his hands.

On 17th October 1977 the two men went out in Angelo’s car and picked up a black prostitute called Yolanda Washington who they knew slightly. It’s likely that they’d previously met her when she accompanied the prostitute who sold them the useless list. Yolanda was tall with long
legs – but she stood no chance against two strong males. They handcuffed her then Angelo drove the car whilst Ken Bianchi stripped, raped and sodomised her on the backseat. Afterwards they changed seats and Angelo took his turn.

Ken then tried to strangle her manually but she fought back and managed to kick Angelo in the head. Angelo then held down her legs whilst Ken used a rag to strangle her to death. He removed a turquoise ring from her finger to give to Kelli, his unsuspecting common law wife.

They dumped her naked body near the Forest Lawn Cemetery. She was the only one of their victims that they murdered in the car.

The autopsy showed that semen from two men was present in her vagina and her rectum, but unfortunately the police assumed this was the result of her being a prostitute. They didn’t realise she’d been raped and murdered by both these men.

Yolanda Washington was just a piece of trash to the killer cousins and to the media who remained indifferent to her murder – but she was actually the mother of a young baby whom she adored. She’d told friends that turning a few well-paying tricks allowed her to spend extra time with her little son.

A fortnight later the men were ready to kill again. On the evening of 30th October 1977 they drove around until they espied a small, thin brunette called Judy Ann Miller. Judy had run away from her impoverished family and had turned to prostitution in order to feed herself. (Her family were all living in the one run-down hotel room, the
four-year
-old sleeping in a cardboard box, when the police tracked
them down and informed them of her violent death.)

Aware that she might not get into a car with two men, Angelo dropped Ken off, drove up to the teenager and started chatting to her. She was hungry and happy to get in the car. Angelo drove a short distance then parked and Ken opened the passenger door, flashed a fake police badge and told the young prostitute that she was under arrest.

Ken Bianchi handcuffed her and Angelo drove them all in the direction of his house. The fifteen-year-old asked if she was being taken to the police station but they told her that they were driving to a special unit. By the time she figured that she was in Angelo’s house rather than a police building, he’d found a rag and was forcing it into her mouth. He also put foam pads over her eyes and taped over them so that she couldn’t see what was going on.

They uncuffed her briefly, undressed then recuffed her. Angelo raped and sodomised her, after which Ken took his turn. Before strangling her, the men put her pants back on so that she wouldn’t soil the houseproud Angelo’s carpet. They also tied her ankles together so that she couldn’t kick out at them.

Ken sat on her legs and Angelo put a bag over her head and sealed it with a cord. He pulled the cord tighter and tighter. Within minutes the teenager’s unhappy life had come to a painful and terrifying end. Ken removed the girl’s bindings and her pants as he and Angelo had agreed to leave their victims nude.

At approximately midnight, the start of Halloween, they drove to the dump location which Angelo had chosen, adjacent to an ex-girlfriend’s house. He deliberately left Judy on her back with her legs wide open to create maximum shock.

On 5th November the men assembled the bindings and gag at Angelo’s house then went out looking for another victim. They saw twenty-one-year-old Lissa Teresa Kastin driving home. Lissa was a dancer who’d studied ballet for many years, danced in an all-girl dance troupe and brought in enough money to live by working as a waitress. But hypoglycaemia had forced her to take a break from the group and she was thinking about going back to college to study foreign languages. It was just after 9pm as she parked close to her house.

Immediately Angelo parked behind her and Ken flashed his police ID and told her that her car had been witnessed leaving the scene of a robbery. She protested but eventually got into their car where they snapped the handcuffs on.

Back at the house, they cut off her clothes but Buono realised that he wasn’t attracted to her. His sadism increasing, Ken Bianchi violated her with a beer bottle – and when she started to bleed Angelo was terrified that his pristine carpet would be soiled.

These murders – like most lust murders – were about power more than they were about sex, so the men now began to part-strangle their victim, cutting off her air supply for a moment then loosening the cord around her neck to allow her a little oxygen. They did this over and over, revelling in her terror and desperate attempts to draw breath. Eventually they continued the strangulation to the point of death and later dumped her naked body in a ditch near a Glendale country club. It was found on 6th November.

On 9th November, the Hillside Stranglers killed again. A beautiful young woman called Jane King was waiting at a bus stop when Kenny joined her. He started up a conversation during which she admitted that her religion was scientology, a religion that she claimed was misunderstood by many. Ken, who had once stolen a psychology degree certificate and rented himself an office in a psychologist’s suite, was able to talk about psychology and win her confidence. Jane believed that her religion gave her a sixth sense about who to trust. In this case she would be horribly wrong…

Suddenly Ken said ‘There’s my friend’ and waved Angelo down. His cousin drew up and offered him a lift. In turn, Ken offered Jane a lift to her flat. She hesitated but when Angelo said that he was a policeman she accepted, after which they drove to Angelo’s house. After they parked their vehicle in the drive both men grabbed Jane, handcuffed her and manhandled her inside.

Once there, she met the same fate as the earlier victims for they tied and blindfolded her, stripped her naked and led her to the spare room. There, Angelo raped her whilst Ken watched. Jane apparently didn’t realise that she was going to die as when Ken began to mount her she said that she was hating every minute of this. Enraged, he hog-tied and sodomised her.

Angelo put the bag over her head and began to strangle her repeatedly with Ken Bianchi still inside her. He climaxed for a second time after she died.

They dumped her naked body in bushes off the Golden State Freeway. It would be a fortnight before she was found.

Murder can only temporarily make the murderer feel better about him – or herself, for once the thrill wears off they are still burdened with their skewed mindset and desperately unhappy memories. As such, killers tend to up the ante in their search for emotional release. Bianchi and Buono had already done this, killing the third and fourth victims much more slowly, and hog-tied the fourth to increase her anguish. But now they decided to abduct a very young virgin, attracted to the idea of an innocent who didn’t yet have pubic hair.

Twelve-year-old Dollie Cepeda and her
fourteen-year-old
friend Sonja Johnson walked past the Stranglers’ vehicle on 14th November. The two men called them over and went into their usual police routine. The youngsters obediently got into the so-called police car and were driven to Angelo’s. There they were stripped, raped and sodomised. The cousins strangled Sonja to death in the spare bedroom then went into the lounge and strangled Dollie, dumping their bodies on a trash heap where they were found on 20th November by a nine-year-old boy. Afterwards, Sonja’s heartbroken father attempted to take his own life.

Twenty-year-old Kristina Weckler was a brilliant art student. She was also a former neighbour of Kenneth Bianchi and had politely turned down his offer of a date. Now – an ordinary Saturday night in November 1977 – he arrived at her apartment and flashed his police badge, telling her he’d joined the force since he’d lived next door to her and that someone had crashed into her car. Kristina
accompanied him to the car park where she was abducted by both men and driven to Angelo’s house. Both cousins raped and sodomised Kristina then Bianchi injected her with Windex in her neck and inner arms. The drain cleaner caused convulsions, after which they bound her head to the gas outlet and gassed her for at least an hour until she died. Her body, found on 20th November, had fingerprint bruises around the breasts and rectal bleeding – and when the police first saw the injection marks they assumed that they were dealing with a drug addict. But the reality was that Kristina even disapproved of marijuana. Ironically, she hadn’t gone to a party that night because she knew that the drug would be smoked.