Couples Who Kill (6 page)

(Much later, when he was confessing to the murders, Ken Bianchi couldn’t remember how Kristina was lured to her death and surmised that she might have agreed to accompany him to a party. But she’d told a friend that he acted like a used-car salesman and that she’d never go out with him.)

Later that same month, Lauren Wagner, an eighteen-
year-old
business studies student, drew up across the road from the home that she shared with her parents. Ken and Angelo, who had been driving behind her, came to an abrupt halt and went into their usual ‘police making an arrest’ routine. Lauren refused to get in their car, at which point they picked her up and carried her bodily to their vehicle. She shouted ‘You won’t get away with this.’ The entire incident was witnessed by a neighbour who did nothing, convincing herself that she’d seen a lovers tiff. (Angelo Buono later made a threatening phone-call to her
house, warning her not to say anything about what she’d seen.)

Back at the house, Lauren tried desperately to save her own life, telling the two rapists that she enjoyed sex and that she wouldn’t report them. It’s a tactic which can work with compensatory rapists – inadequate men who want to believe that the victim is their girlfriend. But Bianchi and Buono were sadistic misogynistic killers whose mission was to cause maximum pain and terror, not find themselves a skewed version of a date. Indifferent to her words, they raped and sodomised then tortured her by taping bare wires to her hands and administering electric shocks. Eventually they strangled her and dumped her naked corpse near the Pasadena Freeway where it was found on 29th November.

The killers now upped the stakes again. On 11th December 1977 Ken Bianchi phoned an escort service and requested that they send him an attractive blonde. The service weren’t supposed to accept calls from payphones so queried Ken’s location, but he was so plausible that they agreed to send a girl round.

The luckless Kimberly Diane Martin was despatched to Apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind. Unknown to her, the apartment was vacant – and both Ken and Angelo, who had forced the lock, were lurking inside. Ken opened the door to her and started up his cop routine but when she saw that the flat was in darkness and that Angelo was lurking in the shadows she turned to flee. Swiftly, the men caught her, hit her and carried her to their car, transporting her to Angelo’s house. There she was doubly raped and
sodomised. Afterwards they dumped her body on a hillside. This propensity for hillside locations would eventually give them their moniker of the Hillside Stranglers.

Three days after this murder, Ken went to the local police station telling them that he was interested in becoming a cop. Could he drive around with them to get a feel for the job? The cops obliged and Kenny pushed his luck, asking them to point out the Hillside Stranglers sites. He was becoming increasingly obsessed by the murders’ publicity, and sometimes spent an entire day reading about the stranglings in the newspaper and watching coverage on the news.

The rest of December and January were victim-free as Jenny Buono was now dying of vaginal cancer. She’d had the disease for some time but was now rehospitalised. Angelo visited her every second day, occasionally stealing syringes from the wards so that he could inject future victims with drain cleaner. He still maintained his
love-hate
relationship with his mother but seemed genuinely grief-stricken when she died in January 1978.

Kenneth Bianchi had an equally bad December as his boss fired him. Ken, who was essentially lazy, had explained his frequent absences from work by saying that he was having chemotherapy sessions to treat cancer. He’d told Kelli the exact same thing, but his boss eventually became suspicious and checked out his story, finding it to be a lie.

Without a wage, he could no longer afford to pay his rent and had to move in with one of Kelli’s brother’s
friends. He had no home, no job and an increasingly
on-off
relationship with Kelli. His rage built and built. The following month he and Angelo would kill again…

16th February 1978 was Cindy Hudspeth’s date with death. The beautiful young girl knew Angelo as she was a waitress at one of his favourite restaurants. She also worked nights as a telephonist to bring in extra money as she was saving up to go to college. When her new car needed floor-mats she took it to Angelo’s workplace.

When she mentioned that she was saving up for her college fund, Angelo told her he had a list of employment opportunities in the house. She happily accompanied him inside where he and Ken pounced on her, stripped her and tied her, spreadeagled, to the bed. They repeatedly raped and sodomised her, strangled her, then put her body in the trunk of her Datsun and pushed it over a cliff. Her body was badly punctured and cut when found but the coroner believed that many of the injuries had occurred as the car crashed at the foot of the cliff.

A week later Kelli gave birth to a boy whom the couple named Ryan – but it was hardly a happy families situation. Ken and Kelli had had a stand-up fight a few weeks beforehand during which he’d given her a black eye. She’d sensibly walked out and had refused to move back in with him. But now she was pleased at how loving he was towards his new son and everyone agreed that he was a doting dad.

However, the mother of one of Bianchi’s girlfriends had become suspicious at how often he talked about the Strangler case, and at how strange he sometimes looked and acted. The police went round and interviewed Kenny, who was his usual plausible self. The interview only lasted for ten minutes and the police went away satisfied.

Angelo took fright when he heard that the lawmen had been round. He angrily pointed out that Kenny had deliberately drawn attention to himself by asking for rides in a police car, and by following the case so obsessively. Unknown to Angelo, he was also stealing jewellery from most of the bodies, and giving some of it to Kelli as gifts. (He was equally light-fingered at work: almost all of his employers suspected him of – or eventually fired him for – petty theft.) Angelo now told Kenny to take a hike and put down the phone whenever he called.

Angelo now wed a twenty-one-year-old Chinese woman, the marriage giving her American citizenship. Needless to say, he treated her as cruelly as his previous wives.

Meanwhile, Kelli relocated to Bellingham, north of Seattle. Soon Angelo broke his silence to persuade Ken to join her there. Shortly after his arrival in town, Ken got a new job as a security guard – but life as a husband and father is very different to life as a serial killer and he was soon restless and bored. He was taken on as a Reserve at the local Sheriff‘s Office and began to attend law enforcement classes, something which had long appealed to him, but he remained listless and depressed. He stole from the numerous houses that he was sent to guard, but
it wasn’t enough. The pressure to be powerful increased again – yet he didn’t have the intellectual or emotional staying power to make himself powerful through his career.

Sex was also proving disappointing during this time as Ken didn’t want to have intercourse with the woman who’d given birth to his baby. Instead, he began to masturbate compulsively, using a piece of rabbit fur because Angelo had kept rabbits and this reminded him strongly of a more exciting time. For a year, this autoerotic sex and an active fantasy life sustained him, then he gave in to the urge to kill again…

When he was given access to an empty house through his work, he began to set his murderous plan in motion. He contacted a girl he knew, Karen Mandic, and asked her if she’d like to housesit for him. He told her to bring along her room-mate Diane Wilder. Both young women were highly intelligent students who were glad of the housesitting fee that Bianchi offered, allowing them to study and earn at the same time.

The trio arrived at the building and Ken suggested Karen accompany him in first to put the lights on. When they reached the basement he pointed his gun at her and ordered her to strip. When she was naked he tied her up and carried her to the nearest bedroom. He immediately went back to the vehicle and fetched the unsuspecting Diane, who he took to the carpeted bathroom, stripped and bound.

For an unspecified time, Bianchi went back and forward between the two girls, terrorising and raping them. He
used several condoms, planning not to leave a semen trace. Then he ordered the terrified girls to re-dress, made them lie on their stomachs and strangled them with a heavy cord. His lust sated, he put both corpses in Karen’s car, drove it to a nearby cul-de-sac and left the vehicle there. He hadn’t been nearly as careful as his cousin, but was sure that no one would connect him to the crime.

But he was very wrong. Karen had told her boyfriend that Ken Bianchi had given her the housesitting job – and Diane had left a memo to Karen saying that Ken had phoned. So when the girls were found dead, the police searched Ken’s house and found dozens of items stolen from various employers. They realised that he had previously lived in the area of the Hillside Stranglings – and further checks showed that he’d been questioned about the murders there. He even fitted the description of one of the men seen abducting Lauren Wagner – and his cousin, Angelo Buono, fitted the description of the other man. The police now took Ken Bianchi into custody and mounted a surveillance operation on his unsuspecting cousin, noting his many years of violence against his wives and girlfriends.

There was also forensic evidence against Bianchi, for, despite using a condom, his semen was found on the girls’ pants. His pubic hair was also found on one victim. Moreover blonde hair from one of the girls was found on him. Diane Wilder was menstruating at the time of the murder and some of her menstrual blood had dripped onto his underwear.

At first journalists didn’t know that Bianchi had used a condom, so, when it was reported that small traces of his semen had been found on the girls’ clothes, they reported
that he’d strangled them immediately and masturbated over their bodies. Other sources said that he’d strangled them on the stairs. But by his own account he put one girl in the bathroom and another in a bedroom and raped them before ordering them to re-dress, then strangling them. This is the same logical chain of events that was carried out again and again during the Los Angeles murders – after all, it’s very difficult to dress a corpse.

Facing the death penalty for up to twelve murders, Ken Bianchi looked for a surefire solution. As luck would have it, the prison television showed a film about multiple personality, reminding him of his previous reading on the subject whilst dabbling in psychology. Bianchi hinted to his psychiatrist that he was having vague feelings of being taken over. Put under hypnosis, he pretended to have a murderous alter ego called Steve. This strangler had allegedly first appeared when Ken was being abused as a child and desperately needed a friend.

Some experts on multiple personality bought Ken Bianchi’s act – but another pointed out that alternate personalities had a surname and Ken obligingly provided the surname of Walker. Enquiries showed that Ken had stolen credentials from a bona fide psychology graduate called Steve Walker and had put these certificates up in his office when he was pretending to be a psychologist. The more sceptical of the doctors also told him that multiple personalities usually had at least three separate identities – and Ken quickly provided a third called Billy, a frightened child. Bianchi was well pleased with his act and began to keep a diary filled with supposedly remembered dreams
and very bad poetry. Grogan, the chief detective in the case, said that Bianchi’s hypnosis scam was ‘a Walt Disney production from front to back.’

By now Ken was convinced that he’d do a couple of years in a mental hospital then go home to Kelli and little Ryan. He wrote to her saying that he was looking forward to walks in the park with his family and that they’d be financed by the book that he was writing. Lazy to the last, he added that he wouldn’t have to write any of the book upfront – just sign a contract and accept a large advance.

Fortunately, some psychiatrists refused to buy into his multiple-personality act. One wrote perceptively that he’d been overwhelmed in childhood by a female authority (his mother) and was now killing women so that he could at last be in charge. Robbed of his Steve-did-it defence, his only hope was to make a deal with the authorities.

Bianchi had dreaded being sent to Walla Walla, one of America’s most brutal prisons. So the District Attorney hinted that if he testified truthfully against his cousin he might be sent to a more amenable Californian jail. The deal included a life sentence rather than the death penalty so Bianchi grabbed it with both hands. Detectives were now allowed to interview him in prison to test his credibility. If he proved truthful, the deal would be formally signed.

Like most criminals, Bianchi didn’t take responsibility for what he’d done. Instead he phrased everything in the passive tense, saying ‘the bag was put over her head’ rather than ‘I put the bag over her head.’ But he gave details of the torture-murders which were backed up by the autopsy photographs, so to that extent he was telling the truth.

The plea bargain went ahead – Ken Bianchi would plead guilty to the two Bellingham murders, for which he’d serve two consecutive life sentences. He’d also plead guilty to five of the Hillside Strangling murders, notably those of Yolanda Washington, Jane King, Kristina Weckler, Kimberley Martin and Cindy Hudspeth.

On 19th October 1979 he pleaded guilty to these seven murders and was sentenced to two life terms, with parole a possibility after twenty-six years and eight months. By now he was changing his testimony so the authorities felt no obligation to send him to a Californian facility. Instead, he was sent to Walla Walla Prison in Washington.