Couples Who Kill (7 page)

The police were at last ready to bring Bianchi’s co-killer into custody. Later that week, on 22nd October 1979, Buono was arrested at his work. The officers noted that he showed so little emotion you’d have thought they were giving him a parking ticket. Now the legal wranglings started in earnest, as the prosecution wanted to drop the murder charges against Buono, arguing that Kenneth Bianchi’s conflicting statements about his cousin made their case unsound. Luckily the judge, Ronald George, refused to dismiss the charges and the case went ahead.

Angelo Buono’s trial finally began on the 16th November 1981. The jury heard that fibre found on Judy Miller’s eyelid had probably originated in Angelo’s workshop. Other fibre evidence showed that Lauren Wagner had been in Angelo’s lounge. Two men fitting Angelo and Ken’s
descriptions had been seen abducting Lauren Wagner after she parked her car.

A flexible gas pipe had been used to gas Kristina Weckler – and Angelo had purchased such a pipe the week before her murder. There was also a cut out area in Angelo’s wallet, consistent with the size of a police badge, though he’d conveniently disposed of the handcuffs which witnesses knew he had. One girl had had a lucky escape after the Hillside Stranglers approached her with their police badge scam, only to find she had a famous father. They let her go – and she was able to identify them.

There were also several sexual assault charges because he’d raped and beaten the two girls he’d kept as prostitutes. Both took the stand and told of the regular abuse they’d endured at his hands.

The defence countered that Angelo Buono was innocent, and that Ken Bianchi had committed all twelve of the murders. But Angelo had been seen helping to abduct Lauren Wagner and various incriminating fibres had been found in his home and workplace. He’d been obsessed with sodomy since he was a teenager, and almost all of the victims had been sodomised.

The defence rightly pointed out that many people enjoy bondage and anal sex, but that, of course, wasn’t the point – the point was that Angelo’s couplings weren’t consensual. His aim had been to cause his victims maximum humiliation and pain before they died.

After two long years of listening to the evidence, the jury retired to consider their verdict. They went out on 21st October 1983 and returned the following month, on 14th November, to convict him of nine of the murders. He was found not guilty of murdering prostitute Yolanda
Washington. (Ken Bianchi had carried out the strangling during that particular crime.)

The sentencing was passed the following year, on 1st April 1984, when he was sentenced to nine life terms with no possibility of parole.

In June 1980, Ken received a letter from a beautiful aspiring playwright called Veronica Lynn Compton. As the child of a political cartoonist, she’d had a cultured background, mixing with politicians and judges. But she’d claim that she was first sexually assaulted at the age of five and was a frequent child runaway. She married and had a child in her teens but was now divorced from her son’s father. Age twenty-two, she was living in a trailer park and taking amateur acting roles, blotting out the pain of her past with an increasingly dangerous cocktail of cocaine and alcohol.

A friend suggested that she write to Ken Bianchi as he could help her with her crime writing, so she watched him on television, feeling compassion when he broke down in tears. For the next year she visited or called him daily and they were soon writing poetry to each other and declaring their undying love.

Veronica sent Ken one of her plays in which a female serial killer plants sperm in one of her victims to confuse detectives. It occurred to Ken that if she did this with
his
sperm the authorities would assume that the Bellingham killer was still out there and he’d be released. (Bizarrely, he seems to have forgotten that he’d also been found guilty of five out of the ten Hillside Strangler deaths.)

His new girlfriend agreed to the plan and smuggled out
a sample of his semen, sealed within the finger of a rubber glove and hidden in the spine of a book.

She now disguised herself with sunglasses and a wig, using a cushion under her clothes to look pregnant. She travelled to Bellingham’s university campus and befriended a woman called Kim Breed in a bar. Kim kindly gave Veronica a lift back to her hotel room and Veronica begged her to come in and keep her company as she’d been deserted by the baby’s father. Kim agreed to have a drink in Veronica’s room. According to Veronica, she persuaded the woman to indulge in light bondage, telling her that she wanted to take photos to play a prank on a friend. The somewhat drunk young woman agreed to this too.

But Ken Bianchi’s paramour suddenly took a cord from her bag and wrapped it around Kim’s neck, pulling tightly. Fighting for her life, Kim managed to grab hold of the would-be killer’s arms and flip her over so that she crashed to the floor. Veronica attacked her again, then broke down crying, saying that ‘he’ had made her do it. Kim tried to find out who ‘he’ was, but the younger woman simply sobbed the same phrase over again.

Kim fled, her throat bruised and her eyes bloodshot. She felt stupid for having gone drinking with a stranger, but eventually realised that it made sense to report the attempted murder to the police.

Veronica finally left the hotel room and went to the airport. There she posted three tapes to the authorities, each read by a male actor claiming to be a Hillside Strangler. She’d taken cocaine prior to the attempted murder and now acted so strangely at the airport that the staff phoned the police. They let her go after questioning but she was picked up after Kim went to the authorities.
The police searched Veronica’s trailer and found a practice version of one of the tapes. In March 1981 she was sent to prison for attempted murder and became known as the Copycat Strangler.

Ken Bianchi now lost interest in her and she transferred her affections to necrophiliac Doug Clark. Veronica was soon writing him fantasies in which she cut her veins and watched him drink her blood. She also suggested that when Doug got out (it’s never going to happen) they could open a mortuary together and said it would be a great honour if he made love to and dissected her corpse.

She escaped from the women’s prison at Gig Harbour on 27th July 1988 but was captured a few days later whilst leaving a friend’s apartment. Parole became possible in 1994 but hasn’t been granted yet. Compton now says that her behaviour was due to drug-induced delusions. She has written a book,
Eating The Ashes
, which criticises the US penal system.

Angelo Buono did not fare well in jail. Terrified that he’d be killed, he refused to leave his cell in California’s Folsom Prison. To pass the time, he tried to make sense of the thousands of pages of his trial transcripts, a mammoth task for a man who was subliterate. He gained weight and his hair reverted to grey because he was no longer able to dye it black. Surprisingly, he still had an appeal to the ladies and married in prison in 1986 when he was fifty-two. As usual his wife was much younger, being a mere thirty-five.

Angelo Buono was subsequently moved to Calipatria State Prison. There, on 21st September 2002, he died of a heart attack in his cell. He was sixty-seven years old.

Kenneth Bianchi also gained weight and lost his boyish good looks in jail. He has spent much of his time in isolation. He changed his name by deed poll to Anthony D’Amato and then to Nicholas Fontana, hoping that newer prisoners wouldn’t know who he was, but the Hillside Stranglers had become infamous and there was no escape.

Not that the serial killer has exactly kept a low profile. In 1987 he attempted to sue writer Darcy O’Brien, claiming that there was a grossly inaccurate portrait of him in O’Brien’s book,
Two Of A Kind
. The author had written a wonderfully detailed account of the murders and trial – but he also painted a picture of Frances Bianchi as a devoted mother and gave the impression that Ken was simply an evil child, describing the little boy as ‘a soul lost to God, rudderless on the voyage of life, a creature who caused weeping in heaven.’ Yet numerous social service reports and hospital records testified to the fact that Ken Bianchi had suffered at his adopted mother’s hands. But the judge threw the case out, explaining that Bianchi’s name was already sullied because of his crimes. Darcy O’Brien died in 1998, but Bianchi has since attempted to sue another company for using his image on true-crime trading cards.

In 1986, Ken was contacted by a true crime fan called Shirlee Joyce Book. Shirlee, aged thirty-six, was an unemployed divorcee with a teenage son who’d seen Ken on a television programme. Obsessed with reading about serial killers, she’d previously set her cap at Ted Bundy but he didn’t want to know.

For the next two years, Ken and Shirlee phoned and wrote to each other and exchanged tapes, then he proposed marriage. She accepted and he sent her an engagement ring through the post. This romantic suitor had earlier told police ‘When you kill a cunt, you make the world a better place.’

The couple met for the very first time on the day of their wedding. The ceremony was attended by their mothers and two convicts. Their request to consummate the marriage in a trailer in the prison grounds was denied. Shirlee, who moved to Washington to be closer to the prison, told a reporter ‘I got me a good one’ and said that she was sure her husband would soon be released.

But she was to be disappointed for her spouse still resides in jail where he’s reverted to his adoptive mother’s beliefs and become a born-again Christian, telling a reporter ‘When the Lord is ready to release me to the streets, He’ll open the doors. I have absolute faith in Him.’

Men who kill as a duo are often heterosexual friends or relatives – Bittaker & Norris, Bianchi & Buono, Lake & Ng. But in the following profile the men were lovers who went on to repeatedly torture and kill at least twenty-seven boys.  

Dean was born on 24th December 1939 to Mary and Arnold Corll in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The couple’s relationship had been stormy even when they were dating, and it worsened after the marriage. But they still brought a second child, Stanley, into the world. Arnold Corll was a strict disciplinarian who would make Dean and his brother sit for hours on a chair without moving as a punishment for being boisterous. He also refused to let them play outside. He told Mary that they should be whipped but she recognised their supposed bad behaviour was just childish curiosity.

When Dean was five his parents’ marriage ended. Mary Corll now had to support the family alone and took a job, leaving her sons in the nursery or with various babysitters. Stanley coped with the frequent changes of minder and went off to play with his friends but Dean stayed home and worried about everything, feeling responsible for his nuclear family. He took on a pseudo-parental role incredibly early and would fret if Mary or Stanley were a few minutes late in coming home.

He developed rheumatic fever at age six and was sent
home from school for a prolonged rest. For the next few months he stayed home with his mother. She took him to a school friend’s party but when he appeared to get upset she decided that he wasn’t enjoying himself and that she wouldn’t take him to further social events.

Her overprotectivity heightened when he was diagnosed as having a heart condition and she rarely let him out of her sight. Admittedly this suited little Dean as he was still worrying about her and Stanley, even exhorting her not to drive too fast.

Some time after World War II ended, Mary remarried Arnold Corll and he subjected the children to increasingly harsh punishments. By now the family had moved to Houston, Texas, and were living in a trailer. All four Corlls co-existed in cramped misery. The second marriage soon went the way of the first with verbal fights and recriminations, though Arnold Corll always kept his family well provided for. He would go on to marry a third time and this marriage would be a successful one.

Alternately ignored, shouted at or punished by his father and emotionally overwhelmed by his mother, Dean retreated into himself. He was punctual, did what he could with an average intelligence but made virtually no impression on his teachers. Outwardly benign, he was probably on the cusp of developing an active fantasy life where he was masterful and cruel.

Meanwhile, he was at the mercy of adult whims. At nine he and his little brother witnessed other neighbourhood kids committing a petty act of vandalism. When the Sheriff questioned them, they described what they’d seen and were justifiably proud of having helped the local law enforcement. But their mother’s response was to demand
her sons be given police protection – and when this was refused she sent them away to live with relatives for the entire summer so that they wouldn’t be picked on by the vandalistic boys.

When Dean was twelve his mother married for the third time so he gained a stepfather, a travelling salesman who moved the family to Vidor in Texas. The town was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and was fronted by a sign which said ‘Nigger, get your ass out of town by sundown.’ Needless to say, the school’s remit centred around sports rather than civil rights.

Dean tried to fit in with the other boys, going swimming with them in the nude and combing the woods for nuts to take home to his hard-working mother. But he fainted in church one day and his heart murmur was blamed. The doctors warned that he mustn’t over-exert himself so from that day onwards he stayed home whilst the others went to the outdoor pool. He joined the school band and took great pleasure in playing the trombone, but the band leader would later be unable to remember him. The quiet boy who never gave his family any trouble was virtually invisible – but he saw and heard the constant bickering between his mother and her new husband. Casual visitors to the house quickly picked up on the terrible tension, so for a sensitive child like Dean it must have taken its toll.

By Dean’s early teens, his industrious mother had set up a candy-making business from home. This took up all of the teenager’s time as he collected the pecans, wrapped and boxed the candies and delivered them. There was simply no time left over for a social life. There was also no time for sexual education but his mother figured he’d watched
animals copulating on his grandmother’s farm and knew all he needed to know.

Meanwhile the ill-educated teenager seemed happy to work for hours after school without pay – but he eventually had enough of being ordered around by his stepfather and being told he was useless. He snapped and point blank refused to run any more errands for the ungrateful man.

Dean continued to live inside his own head. He was sufficiently nice that he didn’t draw attention to himself, but not so approachable that females or older males wanted to befriend him. With his brown hair, brown eyes and neat appearance he was so ordinary that few people gave him a second glance. Those that did noted that he flirted with boys and did everything he could to keep the attractive ones close to him, behaviour that his increasingly-religious mother was quick to deny.

Dean failed his final exams at school but wasn’t too worried as he was going into the family’s candy business. He continued to work long hours there until he was nineteen and his grandfather died. His mother now packed him off to live with his widowed grandmother in Indiana so that she had company and someone to take her to the local Methodist church. The teenager found a job there and even sent money home to his mother. If anything, he was
too
good, a young man who seemed to live a completely selfless life.

Dean’s life at this point was very similar to that of cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer who also lived with his grandmother and regularly accompanied her to church. The rest of the time he appeared to outsiders as completely passive. But beneath his non-person exterior, strong
desires were brewing. Dahmer at first satisfied these by having auto-erotic sessions with a male mannequin, then he drugged men in bathhouses and had sex with their unconscious bodies. Finally, he had sex with men whom he’d abducted and crudely lobotomised, having further erotic encounters with them after they were dead.

At this stage Dean Corll was still getting by with an active sadistic fantasy life. But at age twenty-one he was called back home to help in the candy business as it was really taking off. By now the family had relocated to the Heights area of Houston, Texas, and for the first time the business paid him a proper wage rather than just board and lodgings. Unfortunately relations between himself and his stepfather remained mercurial.

Gradually the family split so that Mrs Corll and her children were running one candy business and her third husband – still living in the same house – was running another. They eventually separated but stalked each other for many months. Mary would later say that the split was amicable but friends said that she hated her ex-husband and was desperate for his candy enterprise to fail. Dean also loathed his former stepfather and worked even harder than before for his mother in order to make their business succeed.

Twenty-one-year-old Dean now set up a pool table on the premises and invited the local children to play there. Several boys fled after he made passes at them but others were glad of the attention as they were from broken homes.

By the time he was twenty-two, the army wanted him to
do his basic training but his mother said that she couldn’t do without him. For the next two years she prevented him being shipped away, but when he was twenty-four he was drafted and attended radio-repair school. His record was spotless and he became more open about his homosexuality. For the first time he could truly be himself. But after ten months his mother contacted the Red Cross to get him back, claiming that she couldn’t run the business single handed. When he returned to Houston he moved into a little trailer next to her house.

Dean kept in touch with his father at this time, visiting every second day and telling him about the family business. Friends said that he respected his dad now.

Dean eventually rented his own apartment but still worked alongside his mother on a daily basis. By now she’d married again, this time to a merchant seaman she met through a computerized dating agency. The seaman was insanely jealous of his new wife and threatened to kill her so she divorced him but bizarrely she soon married him again. The relationship remained deeply unstable and Dean had such bad fights with this man that he soon refused to visit his mother’s house.

Meanwhile all the infighting at the candy company took its toll and it began to suffer losses. Mary Corll decided to give the business up so Dean trained as an electrician with the Houston Power & Lighting Company, testing relays. The work bored him but it was relatively well paid. Now his mother filed for her fifth divorce, telling her friends that her poor marriage record explained why Dean hadn’t married. He was simply a bachelor boy.

The bachelor boy bought himself a powerful motorbike and gave the local boys lifts on the back of it, but he
begged them not to tell his mother as she would worry excessively. When she saw the machine she did indeed worry and scolded him as if he was still a child. In turn, he scolded her for dating, but she was still an attractive woman and understandably wanted male company.

In June 1968 a psychic told Mary that she should leave Houston. She always listened to psychics so she moved to Dallas – and twenty-eight-year-old Dean was on his own for the very first time.

He now rented a house across the road from a primary school and started to invite boys to his house to watch television. There, he’d play the handcuff game, where he’d cuff them and pretend he’d lost the keys. Homosexual serial killer John Gacy had done the exact same thing, going on to torture his cuffed victims for days before suffocating or drowning them. But for now Dean simply teased his trusting captives and let them go. Police reports would record that he had paid other boys ten dollars to indulge in oral sex with him. One such boy was David Brooks.

David was the son of Alton Brooks, a successful paving contractor. Dean had first met David when the boy was only twelve and Dean was twenty-seven, but they lost touch when the Brooks’ marriage began to disintegrate and David was moved around the country to live with various relatives.

At one stage, after stealing a stove in Louisiana, he was taken from his mother and returned to his Houston-based
father whom he hadn’t seen for years, but the first thing the man did was force the long-haired teenager to get a short-back-and-sides. David felt completely powerless now that even his appearance wasn’t his own. All that he owned were his thoughts and as a result he began to tell his girlfriends that none of them really knew him or knew what he was thinking. They probably didn’t as he had a higher IQ than most of the local children and often got good grades at school.

When living with his father didn’t work out, he was sent to live with his grandfather, then his grandmother. When he was fourteen he moved back to the Heights and lived briefly with his mother. There, Dean offered him money to be his sexual partner. Brooks was heterosexual but desperate for cash to buy status symbols so he accepted the offer, rationalising that it wasn’t really homosexual sex if Dean did everything to him and he didn’t reciprocate. This suited Dean who liked to be the active sexual partner, the one in charge.

But during the day, the youthful David was the one in charge. The teenager could call the shots, telling Dean what to get him to drink, to eat and to get high. He also enjoyed going on fishing trips in Dean’s van whilst the other local boys sat on their porches and longed for a more exciting life.

David now became best friends with a teenager called Wayne Henley who attended the same school. He started to hang around with Henley’s crowd at night and his grades dropped markedly. He continued to steal, breaking into a chemists for drugs and stealing from grocery stores. He would offer these drugs for free to younger children. Luckily some told their parents who warned them off.

At fifteen the would-be drug dealer dropped out of school and began living with Dean. The teenager had grown his hair long again and gotten himself a girlfriend. He’d grown to six-foot two so presumably had little sexual appeal for the paedophile Corll, but Dean wanted to keep David around, as David was a magnet for younger boys. The fifteen-year-old had a strong personality, albeit a sadistic one, and was happy to buy a young boy a pizza then take him to Dean’s house, knowing that Dean would talk him into having sex. In return for procuring these children, David got to live off Dean. As a result, Dean was frequently broke.

But the arrangement suited both parties so it continued until David Brooks returned to the house unexpectedly one day to find a naked Dean Corll sodomising two boys who he’d stripped and bound to a homemade torture board. David would later say that this didn’t shock him, but that Dean was clearly shaken at having a witness to the crime. The older man untied the boys and offered to help David buy a car if he’d forget what he’d seen – and envious Heights youngsters soon saw the sixteen-year-old driving a green Corvette.

It was clear to David from the start that this wasn’t consensual sadomasochistic sex as Dean had nailed a metal sheet to the inside of his door so that no one could bore their way out. The torture board was also designed for maximum restraint with holes and handcuffs in the top to hold the victim’s wrists and lower holes with rope to bind the victim’s feet. And, to make sure that the rape victim couldn’t scream the house down, Dean bought several gags. He even wired up a security system so that he’d be alerted if anyone approached his property.