Hillside Stranglers (2 page)

Countless details and encounters have contributed to this book. My work on it, before the actual writing, consisted equally of reading court documents and talking to people involved with the case. Bianchi’s interviews with psychiatrists alone ran to over five thousand pages, the videotapes of those sessions some fifty hours, his confessions to police over twenty hours and two thousand pages, the transcript of Buono’s trial over fifty thousand pages. I played the tapes of Bianchi’s confessions, of which I managed to obtain copies, over and over in my car as I drove around and at night when I was writing, before I went to sleep, so that I could get to know his sounds intimately and dream about him—a ghastly experience but one that always got me writing the instant I woke up in a cold sweat. But in the end none of the reading and watching and listening and poking around I did helped me as much as meeting one particular policeman. He was Sergeant Bob Grogan of LAPD Homicide, and he has become a friend for life.

I first met Sergeant Grogan in March 1983. It had taken me several weeks to make contact with him. I gathered that he did not much care for writers, who he thought were inclined to admire criminals and to give cops a bum rap. So I had stressed my academic credentials, in the hope that he might consider a professor from the University of Tulsa relatively harmless. My message to the sergeant said merely that I wanted to try to understand a homicide detective’s point of view on the law as it applied to murderers. What observations did he have on the Hillside Stranglers case? How strong did he consider the evidence, much of which he had gathered, in this trial that had already run on for over a year and threatened to become the longest criminal trial in the history of the United States? Finally Sergeant Grogan returned my call and agreed to have lunch.

For months I had been examining the transcript, by then nearing thirty thousand pages, and the evidence—thousands of things, photographs of the murdered young women, the love poems of Kenneth Bianchi, an empty wallet—in the trial of Angelo Buono. I worked in a little office on the thirteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown L.A., checking in every morning at nine and leaving at five, as if I were on salary. Just down the hall in Judge George’s courtroom, Angelo Buono sat slumped and contemplative. When something of note was happening in court, I would go in to observe, scrutinizing Buono from various angles and distances, lowering my gaze when I caught his eye. He scared me to death. Even his hands, disproportionately long and sinewy, frightened me.

My subject came to possess me. Each night I found myself jittery and depressed, and my dreams were numerous, but I awoke eager to begin again, like a boozer curing his anxiety with a fresh drink. Mine was a modem sensibility, trained to strive for nuance and irony, conditioned to question absolutes, shaped to be suspicious of words like “good” and “evil.” But the more I studied the Stranglers, their acts, their backgrounds, the theater of their lives, the more my early Roman Catholic beliefs intruded on my skepticism and detachment. I was face to face with evil, and try as I would, I could find neither theory
nor language to ameliorate the unredeemable nature of these men. Conrad’s well-worn phrase “The horror! The horror!” came into my mind every day.

The material, its vastness and its bloodiness, was beginning to overwhelm me. My notebooks filled up; I gave myself daily quizzes on the hundreds of names and places; but I felt that I was losing my bearings. I was getting to know the lives, minds, and acts of two men I once would have thought not human or at least crazy, but now I had to accept both their humanity and their sanity. And, though cousins, the two of them were in their outward personalities wholly unalike, the one silent and watchful, the other all synthetic blabber. Inwardly also they were opposite, the one sober and practical, the other a dreamer, even a romantic. Yet in their brutal acts together they had become two of a kind. How could I continue to try to comprehend them without losing whatever beliefs in life and in the human race I had managed to preserve from my youth?

And so it was that I was increasingly anxious to talk to Sergeant Grogan. He was apparently something of a legend in the LAPD. Whenever his name came up, I noticed that people either smiled or shuddered. He had been a principal investigator on the case from the beginning, or almost, and the story was that catching and convicting the Hillside Stranglers had become the ruling passion of his life. I hoped that talking to him might give me a perspective and perhaps a principle of organization. He was said to be a man of powerful opinions who was not reluctant to express them.

In my experience the best way to get a man to talk is to give him a good meal and many drinks, but Sergeant Grogan was having none of that. He arranged to pick me up on the corner of Temple and Spring in his unmarked Plymouth, and he drove me at catastrophic speed over to the Los Angeles Police Academy in Elysian Park, near Dodger Stadium. Short of being locked into a room at headquarters, I could not have been more on his turf.

At the entrance to the academy’s restaurant I noticed a kind
of shrine to Jack Webb, the creator and star of the old
Dragnet
television series, which as a kid in L.A. I had watched loyally. Badge 714 shone there in a glass case. “This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. I’m a cop.” I quoted aloud the famous opening lines of the show, and Sergeant Grogan laughed mildly. He told me that the academy’s restaurant, swimming pool, and other amenities had been built with money Jack Webb had donated to the LAPD out of profits from
Dragnet.
This familiar sort of link between show business and the city pleased me. We found a booth and ordered pastrami sandwiches and iced tea.

The next several minutes were difficult. I did not know where to begin, the sergeant was obviously unenthusiastic about talking to me, and I immediately noticed that I had forgotten to bring a pen, so that if he did tell me something important, I might forget it anyway. Of course I was too embarrassed to ask to borrow his pen, imagining what he would think of a penless author. I later found out that the sergeant considered my not taking notes a good sign. He never took notes himself when working on a case, having discovered that they could be turned against him in court by some clever defense attorney. But at the time my penlessness added to my unease, as did the sergeant’s size. I am six feet tall, but sitting opposite him, I felt diminished.

He was not only three or four inches taller than I but far broader, and he boiled with energy. His face was red, his eyes bright blue points, and his big bald head, fringed with red hair, seemed to watch me like a third eye. In a harsh Boston accent that, especially there in slumbrous Southern California, made his every utterance sound accusatory, he did a background check on me.

I told all. I confessed that I wanted to write a book encompassing everything that I could about the Hillside Stranglers, their effect on Los Angeles, the city’s effect on them, and their minds and motivations, telling the truth. I wanted to find out what was not known by the newspapers or could not or would not be printed in them.

Grogan stared through me. Eagerly I let drop that my grandfather, Dan O’Brien, had been chief of police in San Francisco during the 1920s.

“Oh yeah? Dan O’Brien, huh?” I sensed that Grogan was noting the name so that he could check it out later. “Well your grandfather would probably be turning in his grave if he could see San Francisco today.”

I agreed, thinking of photographs of my grandfather on parade with his rearing horse, strong, fearless, jovial, tough, his jaw a bulwark, a darker Irish type than Grogan but just as intimidating. I had the feeling that a bond had been established between Grogan and me through Dan O’Brien’s ghost. As if making one last check, Grogan asked me what I thought of a couple of famous books about murder. Spontaneously I expressed negative opinions, citing what I considered sentimental approaches to evil.

“Okay, O’Brien,” Grogan said, “I’ll talk to you.” He settled back and drew a deep breath into his big chest. “I’ll tell you one thing right off. I’ve been a cop all my life and I never saw two sons of bitches as cold as Buono and Bianchi. If I could get away with it I’d kill them myself. And if Buono gets off . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

I expressed surprise that Grogan thought Angelo Buono might get off.

“Are you kidding?” Grogan said. “In this crazy state? In this town? With the law like it is and a jury? Don’t you know he already almost got off? Don’t you know they wanted to let the bastard go? Jesus, you got a lot to learn, professor. Okay, I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you about life in the big city. But you’d better write it straight, pal. Somebody’s got to.”

I had no need of notes to remember what Sergeant Grogan told me during the next hour. It formed the basis for many of the key insights and incidents in this book. He told me about the killers and their victims and the families of the victims, about how close he had become to two of those families, about how his own family life had been consumed and wrecked:

“I lost my wife from this case, not her fault, and maybe my sanity.”

He told me about his fellow detectives and the frustrations and breakthroughs of the investigations. The episodes he recounted and the savage indignation with which he punctuated his stories were unforgettable. We would have many more conversations, in more relaxed surroundings, over the next two years. He would even come to visit me in Tulsa to play golf, talk through the night, and read what I was writing, urging me on, correcting details, adding Groganesque touches. Sometimes we would disagree about this or that person or motivation, and once, I recall, we got into a shouting match about an aspect of Kenneth Bianchi’s background, with Grogan reminding me that he ought to know more about murderers than I did. He sometimes changed my mind. Whether I ever changed his I cannot say, but the debates sharpened my perceptions, I am sure. Often as I wrote his image would float before me, his blue eyes ice-hot and his big red-haired fist banging the table. His rage against Buono and Bianchi never lapsed, and he brought the dead to life.

A writer feels a sense of purpose only when his subject matter so consumes him that he can take on the role of a shaping spirit, disappearing other than in the service of the story. So it is that I have banished myself from the narrative after this point, confident that the characters and events that made up the Hillside Stranglers case will enthrall the reader as they have me.

To some readers portions of the first third of the book may appear unduly shocking, for here I have reconstructed several of the stranglings and their accompanying brutalities in precise detail. These scenes function, however, as necessary ground-work for the psychiatric and legal drama that follows. Without them one can have no good grasp of what Buono and Bianchi actually did, how they did it, and, most important of all, why they acted as they did, progressing from victim to victim with their own diabolical logic. The reader may act as a member of a jury as numerous as humankind, taking on the responsibility of the trier of fact and of motivations more elusive than fact.

I have come to view the story of the Hillside Stranglers as
a parable, although it is of no matter whether others see it differently. There are villains here and victims. There are those who chose passivity as safe passage and those who, whether out of ignorance or self-interest or both, aided the villains in their schemes and scams. But there are heroes, too, people who gave of themselves for no price, never doubting the necessity of doing so, weighing lightly what they gave, knowing what they did was right. Without them the story would not have been worth the telling.

D.O’B.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy; our life, our sweetness and our hope; to thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

—Salve Regina,
prayer to the patroness of the City of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, Los Angeles

Nude and violated, she lay on her back in the flowerbed like a discarded doll. Her head was turned toward the northern hills. Eyes shut, legs akimbo, fingers trapped beneath her buttocks, she proclaimed sacrifice. Ants crawled across her belly, leaving red bites. She was murdered and nameless.

Sergeant Frank Salerno, genuflecting to look, could feel the squeeze of the rope at her neck, which was encircled by a line of dark, purplish bruise. Rope or twine or cord, she had been strangled. Strangulation by ligature was the phrase that occurred to him. He would use it in his report.

It was now just after eight on the morning of Halloween, 1977, a gray day, the air about fifty-five degrees. Salerno, a detective with the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, had been called from his bed to examine the body. It had been discovered at six o’clock where it now lay, about two and a half feet from the curb at 2844 Alta Terrace
Drive in La Crescenta, a middle-class town in the foothills just north of Glendale. Charles Koehn, who had the curious habit of leaving his house at four each morning to go to work at his electrical shop and returning home at six to eat breakfast and check on his family, had noticed the body as he parked in front of his house in the early light. Forgetting what he had learned from hundreds of television cop shows about not disturbing evidence, Koehn had covered the body with a tarp. He had not wanted his or other neighborhood children to go off to school having seen a corpse.

Other detectives, who had arrived before Salerno, had not touched the tarp. Salerno removed it carefully, hoping that nothing important had been lost.

She was pale, small and thin, maybe ninety pounds, neither pretty nor not, her straight, reddish-brown hair neither long nor short. She could not have lived more than fifteen or sixteen years. Scrutinizing her, Salerno reflected that in a decade as a sheriff’s deputy and in more than two years with homicide, he had never seen a body like this. He noted ligature marks at five points: neck, wrists, and ankles. The wrist and ankle bruises were fainter and more irregular than the line on her neck. She must have been tied or handcuffed or both. Her open mouth revealed blood along the upper gumline. Her body bore no other signs.

But as he stared at her face, leaning in closer, Salerno noticed something on the right eyelid. A speck, a white tuft of something. A wispy bit of fluff. He picked it off and held it up to the overcast sky. It looked like angel’s hair, the stuff you put on Christmas trees. It would have to be analyzed. It might be all they had, and it might be nothing. He hoped it had not come from the tarp.

He rolled her over. Nothing. He assumed that she had been raped, but the coroner would determine that.

He stepped back to take in the scene. The body, lying so close and parallel to the street, could not have been missed as the people of the neighborhood began their Monday. It must have been placed there deliberately, Salerno reasoned, not tossed or dropped. On the north side of the street a chain-link
fence, covered with oleander bushes, bordered a big storm basin. Had the killer or killers wished to conceal the body, he or they could have forced it up over the fence, where it would not have been noticed until the smell got bad. The way it lay there, knees out, meant that they had wanted it to be noticed and had wanted it to shock the neighborhood. The more Salerno looked at the position of the body, the more it seemed to him to have been placed there by two men, or more than two. They had probably removed it from a car, carried it over the curb, and put it down. There were no drag marks, neither on the body nor on the ice plant that, still wet with dew, covered the curb. One man could have carried her, but it was unlikely.

Salerno knew that he had no proof that there had been two, nor even that they were men, but he assumed it. He was confident of his instincts: they would not be enough in court but they were enough for him now.

It was a quiet neighborhood, heavily planted, high up in the hills above Foothill Boulevard, old Route 66, remote enough to make Salerno wonder from the start why, having traveled this far up, someone would pick this street to dump a body. Alta Terrace Drive was accessible only from La Crescenta Boulevard—at its other end it dead-ended—but someone this far up could have gone on only a little farther and hidden the body where it would not have been found so quickly. Relatively prosperous working people lived here. They were not rich, but they were well-off and respectable. They would notify the police immediately of anything unusual, as Charles Koehn had. The houses, one-story, ranch-style, had wonderful views of the city to the south at night or when there was enough wind to dissipate the smog. You could see Forest Lawn from Alta Terrace and, to the west, the San Fernando Valley.

Then Salerno noticed something that confirmed or at least supported his hypothesis that there had been two men. A portion of the ice plant next to the curb, almost directly opposite the girl’s feet, had been pushed out of place, tufted up eighteen inches or more and folded back from the curb. He bent down. Under the disarranged ice plant, the dirt had been freshly disturbed. Kicked? Or had a car jumped the curb and done this?

The scene materialized in Salerno’s imagination. Two men had removed the body from a car. One had carried her by the head or had gripped her under the arms; the other had held her feet or had gripped her under the knees. The man carrying the upper part of her body had stepped across the curb first, and his momentum had caused the other man to trip on the curb or to stumble, catching the toe of his shoe under the ice plant.

Then they had put the body down. Had she been placed facedown at first? Then unhandcuffed or untied? Then rolled over onto her back, hands still behind her? Salerno speculated. He guessed at last that she had already been unhandcuffed or untied. Her hands, dangling, had caught beneath her.

Salerno went into Charles Koehn’s house to talk to him and his wife. They had heard nothing during the night. “I sleep like a log,” Koehn said. Had he noticed anything when he had left for work at four in the morning?

“It was pitch-black.”

What about the ice plant? Had it been tufted up like that yesterday? It had not, Koehn said. He would have noticed something like that. He took care of his property. He had just put in that fountain in the patio.

Salerno asked about the tarp. Koehn had taken it from the backyard, where it had been used to cover some toys.

“What kind of toys?”

“Stuffed animals and things. See for yourself.”

In the backyard, Salerno was sorry to see the stuffed animals, some of which had fuzz that might be the wispy stuff he had plucked from the girl’s eyelid. For the same reason, Salerno regretted the Koehns’ white poodle. He called in the man from the Sheriff’s crime laboratory and had him cut samples from the dog and the toys. Then he set about interviewing everyone on Alta Terrace. It was a peaceful street, he found. People worked hard to live there for the view.