Hillside Stranglers (19 page)

A man without a car in Los Angeles is a man without dignity. On the morning of Thursday, February 16, skipping work as usual, Kenny dropped by Angelo’s, walking down from Corona, and complained about the way things were going for him. His car repo’d, his crummy and depressing job at the nursing home, Kelli’s insufferable independence. How was all this happening to him, to a man of his inherent talents? There were people in Beverly Hills with half his smarts driving a Mercedes. He knew he had made some mistakes, but surely he deserved better than this, surely one day his ship would come in. Angelo told him he was a lazy shit but suggested that maybe a spin in the Excalibur would cheer him up. He would even permit Kenny to drive. The sun was out. The rain had let up. Who knows, they might come onto something.

Kenny turned up the radio and headed the Excalibur over toward the Valley, nipping in and out of traffic, feeling like a million or at least as though he had borrowed a million. Someday he would have a car like this! It made him feel a man again. He’d bet you could pick up any kind of a girl with wheels like this. He was Prince Valiant, rolling along in a car named after King Arthur’s magical sword. Angelo, indifferent to mythologies, said that he was hungry for pussy.

They were driving along Riverside Drive in Burbank at about noon when they caught sight of a girl sitting alone at a bus stop. A blonde. Young. “She needs company,” Angelo said. Kenny pulled over. Angelo asked the girl whether she’d like to go to a party in Hollywood. The girl said no. Angelo persisted,
and when she still shook her head, he leaped out, grabbed her by the wrists, and started pulling her into the car.

At that moment another car drove up behind the Excalibur and stopped. Angelo now had the girl by the upper arms, wrestling with her. A woman in late middle age got out of the other car and rushed up, waggling an index finger at Angelo.

“You leave her alone! What are you doing? You come with me, dear. Don’t let these men bother you. Let her go! I’ll get the police!” Her tone and manner suggested a schoolteacher breaking up some roughhousing on a playground.

Angelo, startled, released the girl. Glaring at the woman, fixing her with his most vengeful stare, he said to her:

“God will get you for this!”

In the rearview mirror, driving off, Kenny saw the woman comforting the girl and cursed. He and Angelo were not pleased to have had their sport ruined by a busybody. They drove home in a snit. Angelo said that it was lucky for that old lady that she wasn’t worth a rape.

Angelo returned to work. Kenny walked back up to Corona Street, borrowed one of his hosts’ cars without permission, and drove over to the firm, near downtown, that had repossessed the Cadillac. He wanted to claim some books and clothes that had been taken with the car. He was angry. He felt his pride had been towed away with the Cadillac. He blew up at the manager of the tow yard, insisting that his scuba gear was missing. He would file a stolen-property report with the police. He would sue their ass.

The manager told Kenny to go to hell. In fact Kenny had never owned any scuba equipment, though he would have liked to own some. Scuba diving was the sort of thing he thought he ought to be doing; it fit his image of himself or the image he imagined for himself, not a carless nursing home attendant down on his luck but a muscled stud emerging from the Pacific with a tank on his back and girls at his feet. A man out of a Winston cigarette ad. But that he owned no scuba equipment was not the point. His protest was his way of standing up for his rights. He believed in consumer advocacy. You could not lie down and let these people run over you. At least
that manager would know that he had not been dealing with a nobody. Kenny thought he probably would go ahead and file a claim with the police. He might just get some money out of it.

His two hosts were angry with him for borrowing their car. But what was a guy supposed to do? Take a bus? Hitchhike? Kenny stalked out, down toward Angelo’s again. More and more, Angelo was the only person he felt truly comfortable with. Angelo gave him a lot of shit, but there was a bond there. They had their secrets. Together they had the city at their mercy, if only they chose to use their power, and that made up for any number of insolent managers at repossession lots. It was after five o’clock. Kenny was out of sorts, resentful of life’s inequities. Maybe Angelo would buy him some dinner.

Kenny did not like hanging around the Corona house anyway. To each his own, but he did not approve of that style of life. Fags. Nobody could call Kenny Bianchi a fag. He hoped he might be able to talk Angelo into going cruising that night. Kenny was in the mood, and Angelo seemed to be, judging from the Excalibur escapade that day. It had been a long time, nearly two months. Obviously nobody was on their trail. All that had happened for weeks was that the police had arrested some demented actor and let him go. Kenny figured that he and Angelo had proved themselves invincible. On the chance that Angelo would be willing to try again, Kenny had stuffed into his pocket a false beard he had bought at a Hollywood novelty shop. Wearing a disguise on the prowl sounded like super fun.

When he arrived at Angelo’s, he saw a bright new orange Datsun parked in the driveway behind the white Mustang. Next door at the glass shop and on the other side of the house at the car wash the workers were starting to go home for the day. In the Trim Shop he found Angelo seated behind his desk, talking to a girl, smoking a Kool. The Buzzard in his roost. The girl looked good to Kenny. Shiny, long strawberry-blond hair, scrubbed face. Her figure looked great in black slacks, her stomach flat.

“Shirley,” Angelo said, “this is my cousin Kenny Bianchi.”

“Not Shirley,” she said smiling, pleasant. “It’s Cindy. Cindy Hudspeth.”

“I ain’t so good with names.”

“I want Mr. Buono to make me some floor mats for my new Datsun.”

“Call me Angelo. Or Tony or Ange. Everybody does. Why not be friendly?”

“Sharp car you’ve got,” Kenny said.

“Cindy used to work over at the Robin Hood,” Angelo said. “I seen her in there. She waited on me, so I gives her my card. See? Advertising pays off.” He grinned. “Say, Kenny, I need to talk to you a second. Wait here, Cindy. Be right back.”

Angelo led Kenny into the house.

“Can you believe this?” Angelo said. “Can you believe the luck? What a cunt. One gorgeous cunt. So she walks right in at closing time. Listen, how about we pull a scam?”

“Okay with me.”

“I been talking to her. She’s working nights over at the college. She’s on her way to work now. She wants another job, she says. Wants more money to go to college. Says she’s giving dancing lessons, can you beat that? Wanna dance?”

‘‘I’ve got it, Tony. Listen. Tell her, you know, you’ve got a list, that’s it. You’ve got a list of people with jobs, but it’s in the house. Get her into the house, we’ve got her.”

Angelo looked out a side window. Everybody had gone home from the glass shop.

“Okay,” Angelo said. “That’ll work.”

“But wait. What if somebody knows she came here? She might have told somebody.”

“No, she says she’s just driving by and sees the shop and remembers the card. She just come in here by chance on the way to work.”

“Perfect.”

Angelo returned to his office and told Cindy Hudspeth that it was time to close up his shop now but that he could give her some job openings if she would come into the house. She was grateful for his help. Once she sat down in the brown vinyl easy chair, her hours were numbered. Kenny kept her occupied with small talk while Angelo fetched the gag, tape, and cord. When she said that she lived in an apartment at 800 East Garfield
Avenue, Kenny said that that was quite a coincidence. He had lived right across the street last year. “It’s a small world,” Kenny said.

Kenny won the coin toss this time. But before raping her, he agreed to Angelo’s suggestion that they tie her arms and legs to the legs of the bed. The spread-eagled sacrifice appealed to both of them. They used her for nearly two hours. At Angelo’s urging, Kenny did the actual strangling.

They agreed that her car was a problem. They would have to get rid of it. Angelo went outside to look it over and found his business card on the floor on the driver’s side. He tore it up and threw it in the dumpster. Meanwhile Kenny contemplated stealing her jewelry, but Angelo returned too quickly for that.

“I know a super place to dump her,” Kenny said. “Hey, let me pick the place this time. I know a great one, way up on Angeles Crest. We can push the Datsun off a cliff.”

“Okay,
mi numi
. It better be good.”

“Promise.”

They put Cindy Hudspeth’s body into the trunk of her car, folding in her arms and legs. Kenny remarked how much better the Cadillac had been for this purpose. Kenny would drive the Datsun, and Angelo would follow him in the Mustang. To guard against fingerprints, Angelo, always prepared, presented Kenny with a pair of rubber surgeon’s gloves he had stolen from the hospital.

Kenny attached his false beard, and they headed up toward Angeles crest in tandem. Kenny found the turnout where, a month before, he had enjoyed his tryst with Liz Ward, and he pointed out the hiker’s path to Angelo, bragging about what had been done to him. “I don’t care about your fucking head job,” Angelo said. “Let’s get this thing over with.” They pushed the Datsun front first over the side of the road, the body still in the trunk. The car turned over once, spun around, and came to rest against some logs partway down the cliff.

On the way home Angelo stopped for cigarettes at a mom-and-pop store on Glendale Avenue, where Kenny dropped the rubber gloves into a trash basket outside.

Exactly one week later, Kelli gave birth to a boy. Complications
with the delivery prevented Kenny’s being present at the blessed event. He felt it was a shame that he had wasted all that time at the Lamaze classes. He would have been there had he been allowed: he was not killing anyone at the time. But he was delighted, as he said, that the little person had emerged a little man, Ryan. And he was gratified that Kelli bestowed on the child the surname Bianchi, making it officially an Irish-Italian crossbreed. Kenny was so proud to be a father that he arranged for a photograph to be taken of the new family, Ryan’s hope in life. With Kelli looking on, Kenny posed, the beaming daddy, holding his baby.

The woman Angelo had cursed as the old lady not worth a rape, the busybody, the interrupter of the Excalibur episode, was Jan Sims, a teacher at the Heritage School in Glendale, just off Colorado Street. After she had frightened Buono and Bianchi into taking off, she shepherded the girl into her car, comforted her for half an hour, and put her safely onto a bus, learning neither her name nor her destination. But seeing the girl safe and away was not an end to it for Mrs. Sims. She then went straight to the North Hollywood police station and told her story, describing the Excalibur and Angelo and Kenny, right down to Kenny’s leather coat and acne scars and Angelo’s warning that God would punish her. With all of this talk about the Hillside Strangler in the city, Mrs. Sims expostulated, surely this incident ought to be investigated.

Unfortunately the officer in charge took it upon himself to classify her as a fantasizing schoolmarm. “Oh, lady!” he said to
her. Did she really expect him to believe that two guys would try to abduct a girl in broad daylight from a crowded Burbank street in a fancy sports car? Did she realize how many calls they were getting about the Hillside Strangler? Everybody’s brother was the Hillside Strangler. She should go home and sleep on it. A few hours later, Cindy Hudspeth was dead.

During the next week, Mrs. Sims telephoned the North Hollywood station. She was sure, she said, that she had seen the car in question parked on Colorado Street in Glendale. She had spotted it as she was on her way to work at the Heritage School. “Oh, lady,” the officer said. He would file a report to go along with her original statement. His tone of voice told Mrs. Sims not to bother the police again.

So it was that, as she brooded on the incident, she did not try to tell the police about what else she had concluded. She was sure that she had seen the driver of the Excalibur before, the younger one, the one with the leather coat and the acne scars on his neck. Some weeks earlier, she had been waiting for her daughter in the parking lot of a building on Lankershim in the Valley. As she thought about it, she was certain that the same young man, this time dressed in a dark three-piece suit and carrying an attaché case, had approached her car, leaned on the window, and asked her what she was doing there. When she had explained that she was waiting for her daughter to get off work, the young man had said that he was just checking. He was in charge of security for the building, he had said. Something about the young man’s manner, his bravado, the look in his eyes, had unnerved Mrs. Sims then, and now she was sure that he had been driving the Excalibur. Aware that yet another girl had been killed by the Strangler on that day, she wanted to call the police again, but what was the use? They obviously were paying no attention to her. She was too embarrassed to call them again.

Mrs. Sims had encountered Kenny in the parking lot of the building where he rented his psychologist’s office from Dr. Weingarten. Had she been able to convince the police of the truth of that and of her other eyewitness accounts, the chances of finding Bianchi and of solving the entire case at that point
would appear to have been excellent, because Bianchi’s fingerprints were already on file along with dozens of others taken from the telephone booth at the Hollywood public library and at apartment 114, 1950 Tamarind, following the Kimberly Martin murder.

Back in December another woman had experienced similar frustration with the police, then in connection with Kimberly Martin. She was Dr. Lois Lee, a sociologist and the founder of CAT (California Association for Trollops), a kind of guild for whores that lobbied for the legalization of prostitution and offered legal services and counseling for prostitutes. Near eleven o’clock on the night of December 13, the Climax outcall service telephoned Dr. Lee to inform her that Kimberly Martin had not returned from a nine-o’clock call at 114 Tamarind and gave her the number Bianchi had given them. Dr. Lee traced the call to the library, rushed over to 1950 Tamarind to find the apartment empty, and located Kimberly’s abandoned Oldsmobile down the street. She telephoned the West Hollywood sheriff’s office only to be told that a missing-person report could not be acted on for twenty-four hours and that since the person was just another prostitute, nobody really cared anyway. The remark was callous but also betrayed ignorance of and indifference to the Hillside Strangler investigation, since two of the known victims had been prostitutes. Dr. Lee went directly to the sheriff’s office herself and demanded action. The deputies telephoned the LAPD Task Force headquarters, but an investigator failed to arrive until one-thirty in the morning. By that time Kimberly Martin’s body was already splayed on the hillside, and even immediate police action would not have prevented her death. But when most of this information, not including the initial response of the deputy on the telephone, reached the media, it did little to encourage public confidence in the police. Dr. Lee did not hide her anger.

These and other police errors resulted from several causes: the poor judgment of individual, lower-level officers; the public’s panic, which sparked thousands of false leads, some of them no doubt inspired, as County Supervisor Ed Edelman had predicted, by the huge amount of posted reward money; and
the size of the task force, which by February 1978 had grown to ninety-three officers. While Grogan, Salerno, and the other primary investigators could not have handled by themselves the mass of information coming in, at the same time ninety-three officers could not be expected to communicate effectively with one another, and a majority of these officers lacked extensive homicide experience—other senior homicide detectives had to be assigned to other murder cases. PATRIC, the computer, proved inept at cross-referencing, validating Grogan’s opinion of it as an overpriced filing cabinet. Grogan and Salerno, who were now meeting often to compare notes and theories, circumventing the traditional Sheriff’s Department–LAPD rivalry, agreed that they could be working more effectively if left alone. They especially dreaded and resented what they regarded as the useless and too frequent general meetings of the task force at the Glass House, and they kept some important information to themselves, including the identity of their few and precious key witnesses, lest that leak to the media, tipping off the killers and endangering additional lives.

There were many times when Grogan complained, and not quietly, that the press and television cared far more about selling papers and drawing ratings than whether the killers were caught or more women murdered. He considered the task force largely a capitulation to media pressure and hysteria, and sometimes the press and television fouled up the investigation directly and, Grogan thought, unethically. After Kimberly Martin, for instance, the police had flooded the Hollywood area with undercover cops, male and female, and were able to get the cooperation of prostitutes and pimps, who were suddenly more concerned than usual with personal safety. But some “media asshole,” as Grogan phrased it, broke the LAPD code, and the undercover operation was thwarted by the presence of reporters, including TV cameras and lights. Grogan, called “Walrus” after his mustache and immensity, had to get a new code name.

It was Grogan’s idea to equip a young policewoman with a radio transmitter, called a Fargo, so that she could work undercover trying to tempt the Stranglers into abducting her and yet remain protected. On her first night out she was approached by
a man on Hollywood Boulevard. He asked her to come to his motel. When she refused, though not too vigorously, got into her car, and drove off to an apartment the police had rented, he followed her and tried to go into the apartment with her. The police, waiting inside, jumped him, threw him to the ground, landed a few good punches, and handcuffed him. He turned out to be a Marine on leave from Camp Pendleton, carried away by the policewoman’s beauty and what he had taken as at least a halfhearted come-on. He was good-natured about being beaten up, however, saying that it served him right for trying to pick up a girl off the street. As a Marine he was glad to have had the shit kicked out of him if it helped catch that Strangler.

Early in February, before Cindy Hudspeth, Grogan was asked to take down the confession of one of the several men who had phoned the police or written the mayor claiming to be the killer. Most were dismissed out of hand as nut cases, but this one was so insistent that the police obliged him by booking him—the first man booked in the case. He was an actor named Ned York who had played minor roles in such television dramas as
Starsky and Hutch,
a cop show, and
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.
In “Murder Ward” Ned York had played an orderly in a lunatic asylum who dealt in drugs, in “Nightmare” a cop. He claimed to have known Kristina Weckler before murdering her and to have had an intimate friendship with a male student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design. He was a born-again Christian, separated from his wife, and his personalized automobile license read “RE 3:20,’’ a reference to Revelations 3:20, which advises, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”

“You know,’’ Grogan said, “that’s the right Biblical reference for an actor. I bet that license plate gets him a lot of free grub between roles.” Was York confessing for the publicity?

Grogan ushered Ned York, whose arm was in a sling from a dog bite and whose frantic manner meant cocaine to Grogan, into an interview room on the third floor of the Glass House. Grogan’s partner for the interview was Sergeant Sherman Oakes.

Within minutes Grogan knew that Ned York was making up his confession out of what he had learned from the media and from his own grotesque fantasies. This is one crazy motherfucker, Grogan thought, another tribute to Hollywood’s favorite pastime, cocaine. Nothing he said squared with inside information, notably not the method of strangulation: Ned was accomplishing it all with his bare hands.

He asked for a hamburger and a Coke. Grogan thought, sure enough, I will dine with him and he with me, and, beginning to feel sorry for him, brought him the hamburger and Cokes for all three men. Ned York rambled on, mixing his sorrow at being separated from his wife with his regret for the lives of his victims. He said his little friend at the Art Center had been Kristina’s boyfriend. Well, Grogan thought, he’ll really have something to be sorry for after this, the poor bastard. He’s probably never hurt anybody, but I don’t see him getting any more TV roles. He gave Ned York a cigarette.

Suddenly Sergeant Sherman Oakes, whom Grogan knew to have a quick temper, stood up and splashed his Coke and ice right into Ned York’s crotch. Grogan was surprised and confused. What in hell had this pathetic creature said that could have pissed Oakes off like that? What could make a guy angry at Ned York?

Then Grogan smelled burned cloth and saw little wisps of smoke rising from between Ned York’s legs. York had tried to set fire to his own crotch with his cigarette.

“Jesus Christ!” Grogan shouted. “Let the poor son of a bitch out of here! He hates his dick so much he wants to burn it off!”

There were not many such light moments. Cindy Hudspeth’s murder brought the count to ten, although the press still counted twelve or thirteen, unaware of the distinctive ligature marks; and her murder brought few fresh clues, heightening if possible the public’s fear and police frustration. Relations between the police and the media hit bottom. Grogan complained to anyone who would listen that reporters were not constrained by the rules of evidence and were free to print hearsay. They were interviewing witnesses, sometimes before the police
could get to them, coloring witnesses’ perceptions, endangering them, sometimes misrepresenting themselves as policemen just to get interviews, using composite drawings not developed by the police. Station KABC TV had broadcast a drawing of “the fugitive” that bore no resemblance to anything then known, based on some very dubious reports. And when the
Valley Daily News
quoted Glendale Police Chief Duane Baker as saying that the victims had been sodomized, Grogan was equally furious with the paper and the chief and hoped neither the Wagners nor the Wecklers saw the story.

On the afternoon of February 17, Frank Salerno had received the call to go up to Angeles Crest just beyond the Glendale-Pasadena city line. The pilot of a Forest Service helicopter, who scanned the area regularly to check for fires and cars that had plunged off the road, had spotted the Datsun. Then a rescue worker noticed the nude body through an aperture on the side of the trunk where a reflector had been torn away in the plunge. By the time Salerno arrived, at three o’clock, the rescue team had already hauled the car up onto the highway, and the body lay in the coroner’s van. One look at the ligature marks told him that this was another Hillside victim, although the lines on the wrists, being unbroken, did not look to Salerno as though they had come from handcuffs this time. As for other kinds of evidence, there were none. The tire tracks and footprints on and around the turnout were too numerous to be significant.

At the morgue Salerno watched as the body was taken out of a plastic bag, blood oozing from a laceration on the scalp as attendants laid her out on a gurney. The blood dripped onto her shoulder and down her back as she was being moved. Salerno figured that the wound and some others might likely have come from the body’s being knocked around in the trunk as the Datsun went over the cliff. There was a puncture wound on the bridge of her nose; markings ran down her cheeks from the comers of her mouth, and her lipstick was smeared, indicating a gag; there were four long abrasions, ranging from ten to four inches, on the outside of her right breast and along her stomach
and numerous small marks on the back of her right arm and on her shoulder. At the autopsy, Salerno watched as bits of chaparral were removed from her vagina. These might have lodged, it was agreed, during the difficult negotiation of the body up forty feet of steep cliff.

Cindy Hudspeth’s roommate on Garfield identified the body; she had reported Cindy missing the morning of the 17th. Salerno did his best to comfort Cindy’s mother, who lived alone in Echo Park and had long been divorced from Cindy’s father. She and everyone else Salerno could find described Cindy as a sweet, hardworking, ambitious girl; she had hoped to go to college in Northern California at Humboldt State or at Sonoma State, away from the frenzied congestion of Los Angeles. Bartenders and other waitresses at the Robin Hood Inn and the Red Vest in Glendale, where Cindy had worked part-time, said that she had been friendly, efficient, and rather naive for a twenty-year-old Californian. She had been much liked by the customers, many of whom would request that she wait on them. Her boss at Glendale Community College, where she worked nights answering the phone in the adult education section, said that she was “just the kind of girl you would always want around.” She had loved disco dancing, had won several dance contests, and was planning to give dancing lessons: she had had business cards printed up. But she had not been able to decide where to give the lessons; she was afraid to bring strangers to her apartment. She had been, like everyone else, worried about the Strangler but had felt safer now that she had a new car. She had been planning a holiday in Mexico with friends.