Hillside Stranglers (37 page)

Now, on November 16, 1981, jury selection began. Early in the process, Boren and Nash decided that Chaleff and Mader
were trying to trick them into using up challenges of prospective jurors at the start, leaving the defense’s challenges for crucial final selections. Instead Boren and Nash accepted a panel of twelve jurors and eight alternates as soon as they felt they had a reasonable group; and the defense, since it had let these candidates pass, was stuck with them. Of the jurors, ten worked in city, county, or federal civil service positions. One was a retired Dolly Madison Bakery employee and one a female Pan American Airlines flight attendant. They included, promisingly in the eyes of the prosecution, one woman with two daughters and another woman living near the Eagle Rock Plaza with a teenage daughter.

From the prosecution’s point of view, the social and economic character of the jury was encouraging: these were working people, none rich, none idle. Such people tended to be more realistic than the privileged classes about extremes of human conduct. For the prosecutor trying to convict an Angelo Buono, the worst possible juror would have been someone isolated by wealth or status or both from the harsher realities of urban life—a Beverly Hills matron, say, or a young university professor or a Unitarian minister—who luxuriated in an exalted view of humanity, felt guilty about privilege, and was unable or unwilling to accept the idea of the ruthless. As Grogan said, the ideal jury to convict Buono would have consisted of homicide detectives and whores.

The jury as finally chosen included seven women and five men, among them—as nearly as can be surmised from names and physical appearances—six Afro-Americans, two Anglos, and four Hispanics. The alternates, of whom two eventually became jurors, were similarly mixed, with only Asian-Americans missing from among the chief ethnic population groups of Los Angeles. Ethnic and sexual balance had become important factors in determining the fair selection of juries, and this one appeared immune to scrutiny on appeal.

It took three and a half months (fifty-four actual days in court) to select this jury, delaying the actual start of the trial until the spring of 1982. The cause of this tedium and expense was California’s cumbersome system of jury selection. A
hundred and twenty prospective jurors were examined—these surviving from an original panel of three hundred and sixty, those who could not serve for several months being excused—with defense and prosecution both permitted twenty-six peremptory challenges. By law, both sides were allowed to examine each prospective juror directly, and the judge and counsel had to question each in individual court sessions from which all other jurors as well as members of the public were excluded. Interrogation covered such matters as whether he or she would vote for acquittal because of opposition to the death penalty. This time-consuming procedure—in many other states and in the federal system the judge alone, sometimes guided by written requests from the attorneys, conducted the examination of jurors—was the result of judicial decisions and legislative lobbying by attorneys, who got paid by the hour and were jealous of their prerogatives. Direct questioning of jurors by lawyers was permitted in
all
felony and misdemeanor trials in California and helped to clog the courts. During the Hillside Stranglers trial, jury selection in another Los Angeles murder case, this one involving only one count and one defendant, took from April of one year to February of the next, a full ten months. Judge George, who had lobbied for the system’s reform, calling it “sick” and a prime reason for growing public contempt for the criminal justice system, said that he felt “disquieted” when fellow jurists congratulated him on getting a jury for the Buono trial in “only” fifty-four court days.

When at last the jurors were impaneled, they learned that the trial ahead of them was expected to last about a year. Court would meet from ten to twelve and from one-thirty to four-thirty, with time off for holidays, doctor’s appointments, and funerals. The jurors’ employers, including Pan American, agreed to pay full wages for the length of the trial. In addition the jurors received five dollars a day and fifteen cents per mile to drive to and from the courthouse. They had to pay for their own lunches.

Only two weeks into the trial itself, another important ruling presented itself to the judge. At issue were Bianchi’s extended statements to the police in Bellingham, the interviews
for which Salerno, Grogan, and the others had so carefully prepared and which had elicited minutely detailed accounts of the killings, much new information, and several items that Bianchi could have known only from being present at the murders. Without these statements the prosecution’s case would be greatly weakened, but because they had not been made under oath and for other, technical reasons, the judge ruled them inadmissible. Only Bianchi’s testimony under oath would be let in, the same “morass of contradictions” which had been the basis for Kelly’s motion to dismiss.

But then Chaleff and Mader—in what was probably a serious lapse in defense strategy—exercised their right to cross-examine Bianchi on his Bellingham statements. The defense’s intention was to underline Kenny’s contradictions, but the result was to render admissible the Bellingham confessions in full and to permit the prosecution to show that much of what Bianchi narrated in Bellingham was, unlike his later obfuscations, verifiable: the needle mark on Kristina Weckler’s neck, for instance, unnoticed until Bianchi had mentioned it, and his positioning of Lauren Wagner as confirmed by the fibers. Equally important was that audio tapes of these confessions were now played for the jurors, who could judge for themselves whether anyone, no matter how accomplished a liar, could have invented such a mass of details—dialogue, physical description of victims and locations, such things as the cigar box, itself an item of physical evidence, in which Angelo had kept the handcuffs. Boren and Nash had been struck by the convincing qualities of these tapes—including the tone of Bianchi’s voice, even, matter-of-fact, so different from the histrionics of the psychiatric sessions—and they hoped that the jury would react similarly. They rejoiced that Chaleff and Mader had opened the door to letting in these tapes and that Judge George was quick to admit them.

Another opening which Boren and Nash had hoped for came when Chaleff and Mader brought in Tanya Dockery to testify that Angelo, far from being brutal and violent, had once tried to sodomize her but had stopped when she had protested. Although some evidence of Buono’s harshness with women
had already been admitted, Boren and Nash saw this attempt to show what a gentlemanly fellow Angelo really was as a breakthrough. As Judge George ruled, Dockery’s testimony allowed into evidence Sabra Hannan’s testimony that Angelo had tried to force her into submitting to sodomy, Becky Spears’s testimony that Angelo had injured her by repeated acts of forced sodomy, and Antoinette Lombardo’s testimony that Angelo had sodomized her. The judge kept out some details, including the orgy at the box factory and the attempted extortion of David Wood, but bit by bit the truth was now permitted to emerge.

Some witnesses found it more difficult to talk than others. Sabra Hannan, clearly relishing getting back at Kenny and Angelo, narrated her grotesque experiences in fluent and vivacious detail. She was married now and working as a dental hygienist. Becky Spears, by contrast, was forlorn, sickly-looking, clearly distressed at having to recapitulate her suffering. Perhaps most touching was Antoinette Lombardo, who had so naively loved Angelo and believed in a matrimonial future with him. She was now studying to be a court reporter. Her husband waited for her in the hallway as she managed to describe various horrors, and when she was finally permitted to leave the courtroom, he embraced her.

The work of Paul Tulleners, Boren and Nash’s special investigator, added much to the prosecution’s case. Tulleners was a demon researcher, and over the weeks and months he dug up material no one else had found. To begin with, very little was known about Angelo’s life prior to his linking up with Kenny. Other than Candy, relatives stuck to a policy of
omertà,
some from fear and others, like Angelo’s sister Cecilia, from loyalty; and Jenny was dead. Angelo, of course, said nothing, except that he did give an interview to a television reporter, Jim Mitchell of KNXT, whom he telephoned from jail saying he wanted to talk. At the jail Angelo told Mitchell:

“I didn’t do nothing, and they’re trying to put me in the gas chamber. If I killed somebody, they have a right to burn me. I believe in that. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I didn’t kill nobody.”

Angelo, whom the reporter described as “a forty-seven-year-old family success story,” continued:

“I voted for the death penalty. If a guy did wrong, kill the son of a bitch. . . . You know that D.A. dropped the case. I didn’t like Kelly but he didn’t have no evidence. But the judge wants to keep it going. I don’t know why. I think he’s biased. Why am I in this courtroom? Because some judge thinks he’s God. I’ve never been in a courtroom before. I don’t know what’s going on. . . .

“Hey, man. I’m getting gassed in that courtroom. I’m getting railroaded. This whole thing has been a political trip from day one.”

Tulleners’s work, however, dug up the truth about Angelo’s background. His juvenile and later court records at first appeared to have been lost or destroyed, but Tulleners patiently hand-searched the files and was able to fill out the picture of a man who had been a bully and a thief since childhood and who had, contrary to his protestations, been in courtrooms and jails many times before.

Tulleners also found Angelo’s first wife, verified Angelo’s failure to support any of his eight children financially, and located Nanette Campina in Florida. He interviewed Nanette there. She was most reluctant to talk. Unlike Candy, she was still afraid of Angelo, and Tulleners could see that it would be impossible to get her to come to Los Angeles voluntarily to testify. Eventually she did begin to confide some stories about Angelo’s brutality, about how she had escaped to Florida, and about how her daughter, Annette, had complained about Angelo’s “advances” to her. But unfortunately Tulleners was accompanied by a young, greenhorn fellow investigator, who reacted with such ill-concealed shock and disgust at Nanette’s revelations that she clammed up from embarrassment. Tulleners had heard enough, however, to conclude that Angelo had raped and beaten Nanette regularly and had certainly slept with his stepdaughter.

It was unlikely that all of this material would be admissible at trial, but all of it bolstered Boren and Nash’s confidence in their case and made them feel even more strongly that their
cause was just. Of admissible evidence the most important Tulleners unearthed was the white Mustang Bianchi had named as the car used in the abduction of Kimberly Martin and in the dumping of Cindy Hudspeth’s body. Bianchi had said that the Mustang had stains on the carpet on the passenger side, probably from a leak in the air conditioning. Tulleners checked through thousands of vehicle registrations, narrowed the search to a few hundred, began personally inspecting these, and finally found the right car, the carpet stains still visible. He was able to trace it back to the woman who had consigned it to Angelo for sale in 1977.

When Bianchi took the stand in June 1982, he became the two hundredth witness to testify. It fell to Michael Nash to examine him, and Kenny was less cooperative than ever. He denied remembering anything about any murders. He had been scheduled to testify for a month, more or less; now it looked as though he would be through in a day. But in a court session in which Bianchi’s lawyer, but not Bianchi himself, was present, Judge George let drop the question whether Kenny was violating his plea-bargain agreement to testify against Buono. After all, hadn’t Bianchi agreed to testify fully and freely? If he was found to be in violation of the agreement, he would have to serve his time in Walla Walla, something Bianchi had thought it worth bargaining to avoid.

Having had an evening to consider the prospect of Walla Walla, Kenny began talking again the next day, still contradicting himself but at least giving Nash the opportunity to catch him in lies or in inadvertent truths. Boren and Nash were so meticulously prepared—they developed a filing system that enabled them to locate any of the thousands of documents quickly, and they devised a daily summary of the transcript, which by October 1982 had grown to over twenty-five thousand pages—that they were able to elicit some revealing points from Bianchi, particularly about his association with Buono before the murders. Kenny always looked directly at Nash and never at Angelo. The only interchange between the cousins came when Kenny described having intercourse with a girlfriend of Angelo’s on the water bed, something he knew Angelo would
have been furious about had he known. As Kenny told of the event, obviously pleased with himself, Angelo quietly gave him the finger.

If Nash was skillful at eliciting from Bianchi elements of his relationship with Buono, Chaleff was also good at confusing matters when he questioned Bianchi, who was glad to help with contradictions. By the time Bianchi stepped down, after five months on the stand, most of it under cross-examination by Chaleff, Nash privately confessed himself ready to strangle the witness, and he worried whether the jury had become over-whelmed by all the testimony. If muddlement was Chaleff’s strategy, he was doing well with it.

One afternoon after the day’s session, Jerry Cunningham, Judge George’s bailiff, a young sheriff’s deputy with a fresh and open face, remarked to the judge that it was a shame that a guy as intelligent and articulate as Ken Bianchi had not put his talents to better use.

“A guy like that,” Cunningham said, “he could have made something of himself. He could have gone someplace in society. Done something useful.”

“Yes,” Judge George said. “He could have been another Albert Speer.”

Suddenly, in the middle of Bianchi’s testimony in October, the defense made a major move. Katherine Mader had belatedly discovered that Markust Camden had spent time in a mental hospital, and the defense accused Frank Salerno and Pete Finnigan of deliberately withholding this information, in violation of California’s discovery rule. Chaleff and Mader alleged that there had been “willful law enforcement misconduct which has made a sham of the prosecution of Angelo Buono” in that “specific critical impeachment information regarding Markust Camden’s credibility was known by Sgt. Frank Salerno and Deputy Peter Finnigan in 1979, and [has] been deliberately withheld from the defense since that time.” The motion also claimed that since Salerno and Finnigan withheld the truth about Camden from the magistrate who had issued the search warrant for Angelo Buono’s house, all evidence obtained in that
search, including the fiber and carpet material and Angelo’s wallet, should be suppressed. Salerno and Finnigan were part of a “conspiracy to convict Angelo Buono.” They were aware that Camden “has spent almost his entire adult life institutionalized in mental facilities.” They were aware that he had been “hospitalized as ‘delusional’ and ‘psychotic’ at the time of Sheriffs’ contacts with him in 1979. . . . Salerno and Finnigan, as a deliberate pattern of conduct, failed to maintain contact with potential witnesses who contradicted Markust Camden” (an apparent reference to the long-forgotten and discounted Pam Pelletier, who, since she had been hypnotized, could not now have testified). They had by allowing Camden to testify “and by not coming forward with information they possessed regarding Camden’s mental capacity, perpetrated a fraud upon the court.”