Hillside Stranglers (21 page)

It was strange, Grogan often thought, the way his life was being taken over. Salerno, equally conscientious but more emotionally detached, kept his family in place, Grogan could see, went to mass on Sundays with the wife and children, had to Grogan an admirable and enviable perspective: no matter what happened, the Salernos would go on, Salerno would do his work, the family would be intact. But Grogan was so involved by this case that the Wagners and the Wecklers began to haunt every moment of his life. What was Charlie thinking now? Had Joe found out what sodomy is? Grogan envied Salerno the coolness, the knack of turning off the job and embracing the family,
permitting the family to triumph over the rest of life. He envied Salerno because he knew that Salerno was just as good at his job as anyone could be, just as dedicated a detective, yet he was keeping his life in one piece.

One afternoon at the Glass House, Grogan interviewed a woman who said she might have seen the Stranglers. She was agitated. The incident had occurred a month earlier, but she had been afraid to report it. Friends had persuaded her to go to the police. She had been drinking in a bar in Hollywood. She had gotten fairly tight. She was alone, and when she left the bar, she drove off at a pretty good clip, “my bra flying from the radio aerial,” as she put it. A couple of blocks away, two cops pulled her over. They had a red light, but it was an unmarked car. There had been stuff in the paper about the Stranglers posing as police officers, so when one of these guys came up to her window, she really let him have it. She cursed him, let out a stream at him. He showed her his badge. She took off, gunning it. She had worried about the incident. The men had not followed her, but she had wondered ever since whether they might be the Stranglers.

Grogan had her hypnotized. Under hypnosis she said that she recalled the badge number. She gave Grogan a detailed physical description of both of the men.

Grogan took the woman seriously. She seemed bright, and she was familiar with police work. She said that she had graduated from Reed College with a major in English and now ran a halfway house for men released from Chino State Prison. She knew criminals and had worked in various law enforcement agencies for years. She was in her thirties, tall and blond with an alert, attractive face.

Grogan had a bulletin sent out to all the LAPD stations, and he decided to check out the story himself. It turned out to be accurate but so embarrassing to the police that, if it got out, the press would have a field day and the public might panic. Two officers working vice had tried to pick the woman up. They had made what was known among the police as a “pussy stop” after an evening of watching prostitutes. It was a common
enough occurrence, but under present circumstances it was potentially disastrous. The woman had actually remembered the badge number in reverse, because it had a nine and a six in it and she had seen it upside-down.

Grogan reamed the officers out, told them they would be canned if their intended pickup pressed charges, and called the woman to explain what had happened. She was understanding. She agreed when Grogan told her that the pressures of working vice were considerable: you got turned on watching whores all night. She would not press charges. She knew what the police were going through with this case.

Grogan started babbling about the frustrations of the investigation. He told her about the Wagners and the Wecklers. He complained about the unethical irresponsibility of the media. He said that he could not burden his family with everything that was going on and that he was frightened every time his daughter left the house. It was no wonder that with a job like this cops were cracking up and dropping from heart attacks. It was like being in a war that never let up.

“You can talk to me, anytime,” the woman said.

“That’s okay. Thanks,” Grogan said and hung up. I talk too much, Grogan said.

But he called her again, met her for a drink, and found himself unloading his emotions with a vehemence that surprised him. He could not stop talking to her, and when he told her about keeping Kristina Weckler’s notebook, he knew that he had crossed a certain line. The woman turned out to be an ideal listener because of her familiarity with prisoners and police work, and, unlike Grogan’s wife, she did not recoil from grisly details and violent language. She was tough, but he did not think her coarse. He let himself go. He would see her again.

He began an affair with her. He disliked himself for doing it, but he allowed himself to go ahead, and he worried that he might be falling in love with her. She lived fifty miles from downtown, so he did not see her except on weekends, but he began taking her out on his boat. The intensity of the case made it easy to contrive excuses. Every few days he would resolve to break off the affair, but he did not. At home he was silent and
guilty. His wife did not know anything, yet, but sometimes the sight of her sad face on the pillow made Grogan go lock himself into the bathroom, despise his own face in the mirror, and feel like crying. He would have to end the affair soon, he said to himself. His children would hate him, too.

October 17, 1978. One year to the day after the murder of Yolanda Washington. Her death had started it all. The investigation was in the doldrums. Nothing new had turned up for eight months except hundreds and hundreds of false leads. The media had become bored with the case, and in a way this made life a little easier for the officers, but they could feel the public pressure on them, unresolved anger gathering, spreading blame in the air. The parents evolved from grief toward a craving for retribution, so they could make sense of their lives again or try to. Sonja Johnson’s father attempted suicide. Over at the Glass House, Grogan, Dudley Varney, and Bill Williams, the officer who had convinced everyone else that Yolanda Washington must have been the first Hillside victim, decided that somehow they ought to commemorate the occasion. They ought to get drunk at least. They had to find some way to expiate their frustration for this one night. It was too late to go home. They had talked about the case all day and into the evening. Yolanda had been dead for a year this night.

Grogan, with his inclination to ritual, born of the mass-serving days in Boston, memories of Cardinal Cushing, the bread and the wine, suggested that they get a bottle and drink it where Yolanda Washington’s body had been found—Forest Lawn Drive, across from the movie set. It was only right, he said. They had to do something. It was the anniversary, for Christ’s sake.

They picked up the bottle and a pizza along the way. Williams brought a sheet from the morgue. He had taken it off a body in a moment of levity.

There at the very spot on Forest Lawn Drive they stopped, spread the coroner’s white sheet on the hood of Grogan’s car, opened the pizza, and drank, toasting Yolanda, cursing the Stranglers, and wishing on stars for clues. They invoked the
names of the dead: Yolanda, Judy, Lissa, Jane, Dolores, Sonja, Kristina, Lauren, Kimberly, Cindy.

“You know,” Dudley Varney said, “some people would think we’re nuts, doing this.”

Grogan gathered up the pieces of pepperoni, little Italian eucharists, on the pizza and laid them down again, spelling out her name: Y-O-L-I.

“Pass the bottle,” Grogan said. “Here’s to you, Yoli.”

What is possible is persuasive; so what has not happened we are not yet ready to believe is possible, while what has happened is, we feel, obviously possible: for it would not have happened if it were impossible.

—Aristotle,
Poetics

February 1978 was an uneven month for Kenneth Bianchi, socially speaking. Although he achieved murder again and fatherhood, he was forced to change residence for the fifth time in the mere twenty-five months of his life in California when the men on Corona Street kicked him out. They were fed up with his irregular habits, his borrowing their cars without permission, his bringing high school students over to smoke dope and watch pornographic movies. They had invited him only as a favor to Kelli Boyd’s brother, who was their friend, but they had expected Kenny to stay three or four days. It had now been over two months and no rent paid. When they discovered a California Highway Patrol badge among their guest’s belongings, they decided he must go. They did not really suspect him, but the television and newspaper reports that the Hillside Strangler was probably posing as a police officer made them nervous; they had already concluded that Kenny must be lying
about his degrees in psychology; this was not the kind of person they wanted as a nonpaying tenant. After Kenny left they told a neighbor who was a Glendale policeman about the CHP badge.

Kenny found an apartment for himself on Verdugo Road in Glendale. He was alone again. Kelli brought the baby over for Kenny to play with—he seemed to enjoy changing diapers on his little man—but refused to live with him. She was thinking, she said, of moving up to Bellingham to be closer to her parents and to raise Ryan in a healthier environment than Los Angeles. When Kenny asked her whether she wanted him to accompany her and the baby, she was noncommittal. Yes, she agreed that the boy needed a father. She was less sure that she wanted the father to be Kenny.

He bore these rebuffs to his love and paternal sense of responsibility with good grace. Surely Kelli would feel different once he began to prove himself. In the meanwhile he secured himself a new job cleaning, sterilizing, and delivering surgical instruments at Verdugo Hills Hospital. On his application he listed studies at Columbia in psychology and work at Strong Memorial Hospital in New York. As a character reference he named Angelo Buono, “re-upholsterer.” His application so impressed the hospital that although he had asked merely for an orderly’s job, he was given greater responsibilities at higher wages. With money borrowed from Sheryl Kellison he bought a car for four hundred dollars from a fellow employee. Things were looking up again. The true test of character, Kenny told himself, was whether you could endure setbacks and keep striving.

Nor did he worry much when the police came to interview him twice more. First a Glendale officer arrived at his apartment to ask him whether he owned a police badge. Kenny said he did not. That was that. The Glendale officer took his word. Then two LAPD officers, neither one a principal investigator on the Hillside Strangler case, came to call. Mrs. Wanda Kellison, Sheryl’s mother, had telephoned the task force about Kenny. Her daughter was going out with this strange man, Mrs. Kellison said. She had argued about this man with her daughter, telling Sheryl that a man who borrowed money from a girl
was no good to begin with, but Sheryl would not listen. Sheryl seemed to feel sorry for this Kenny Bianchi. Mrs. Kellison was worried. Bianchi had a strange look in his eyes. The task force should check him out. She could not say exactly why, but for some reason Mrs. Kellison thought that Bianchi might be the Hillside Strangler. For one thing, her daughter said that Bianchi talked about the Strangler all the time.

Mrs. Kellison was far from the only mother calling the task force to complain about a daughter’s boyfriend. It had become a popular way for a parent to express disapproval of a prospective son-in-law. Grogan suggested that the task force set up a dating service; at least the computer could be put to good use that way. But the rule was to check everything out, so two junior officers were dispatched to investigate Bianchi. From the Department of Motor Vehicles they traced the address listed on his driver’s license. One would think that 809 East Garfield would have inspired in these officers’ minds an immediate connection to Kristina Weckler and Cindy Hudspeth. It did not. Nor, when they punched Bianchi’s name into PATRIC, the computer, did his previous police interview at 1950 Tamarind show up. So off they went to trace Bianchi, figuring that this was another of the thousands of false leads that were multiplying daily.

At 809 East Garfield the landlord remembered Kenny Bianchi well. He had been an ideal tenant, quiet, so gentlemanly. You did not find many such young men these days. There had been this other tenant, Angie Holt, who had complained about him, but she was a troublemaker. Kenny was such a nice young man. He had kept in touch, had let it be known that he had become a father. He was so proud. If only all the tenants were like Kenny! He was living over on Verdugo Road now. They could find him there.

At the Verdugo apartment the officers told Kenny right away that his name had come up in connection with the Hillside Strangler investigation.

“Okay, fine,” Kenny said, opening his door wide. “Won’t you come in?”

The officers asked him whether he had been in town from
October 1977 through the present time. Kenny said yes, he had been in Los Angeles since early in 1976. He had not been in jail? No, Kenny said, smiling as though the question were embarrassing, as though the very idea of jail were entirely alien to him. Had he ever been or was he now connected to any law enforcement agency? No, but he admired the police, the job they did, what they went through. In fact he had an application in to join the LAPD Reserves. He supposed he had not heard from them because of his changing addresses.

The officers thanked Bianchi and left. They did not ask him whether he had been interviewed before by the task force. The interview had taken less than ten minutes. Back at the Glass House the officers wrote up their report and filed it along with their photostat of Bianchi’s driver’s license. They did not bother to check on his LAPD Reserves application: his fingerprints were on that, and they could have been compared with the fingerprints from the phone booth and the Tamarind apartment, but these officers were not even aware of the phone booth and apartment prints.

It cannot be said to have been tough, but Kenny had handled the interview well. He knew Angelo would have been proud of him, and he hurried over to tell him about it. He found Angelo in the back stroking the rabbits, making Sparky jealous.

“Can you imagine,” Kenny said, “I fooled the cops again.”

“Keep your mouth shut,” Angelo said. He told Kenny to go inside.

They sat down together in the den. Could you beat that? Kenny said. Three times now the cops had questioned him and they had not even come close. They never would. Not a chance.

“I was so cool. No sweat. Those idiots, they didn’t even look at my driver’s license.” He took it out and showed it to Angelo. On the front, the Garfield address. He flipped it over and showed Angelo how he had written out in his own hand, duly accordant with the motor vehicle code, his subsequent address: 1950 Tamarind. Angelo stared.

“They didn’t see this?”

“Are you kidding? They didn’t see anything. I’m clean, Tony, clean and clear. They can’t touch me.”

Angelo slumped down, pulling on his earlobe. This was just great. Three times now the cops had been to see Kenny. They might really be on to something. They probably weren’t telling all they knew. All of Angelo’s misgivings about Kenny came back. The fuckup with Kimberly Martin. His telling the cops on the ride-along that he wanted to see the Strangler sites. His unhealthy lust for publicity. And now the cops were closing in on him. What else had Kenny said to people? What might he have said to Kelli or to the dudes on Corona? Angelo knew that he must act. He must get rid of Kenny.

“What’s the matter, Angelo? You got something on your mind? I know you. The Buzzard’s thinking something. The Buzzard’s got a new scam. What’s it going to be, Ange? What’s going to happen? Hey, Angelo, say something. You’re making me nervous.”

Angelo said nothing. He walked over to the gun case, took out the .45 automatic, and shoved in a clip. Then he turned and pointed the gun at Kenny’s head.

“I ought to off you right now,” Angelo said.

“Hey, Angelo, hey, put that down. What’s happening to you? Tony, why me? This is Kenny. This is your cousin Kenny. I thought we were partners. I thought we were in this together.”

“I ain’t in nothing, fuckhead, you stupid bigmouth fuckhead. How come the cops been to see you three times, they ain’t been to see me once, huh? How come the cops know who the fuck you are, huh? You don’t see no cops fucking around with Angelo Buono, right? What’s the matter with you? You want to blow this deal? You talk too much.”

Kenny hung his head in contrition. He apologized to Angelo, begged his indulgence, promised he would be cool from now on. Angelo calmed himself, put the gun away, went into the living room to stare at the fish. Kenny followed him, whining. Angelo told Kenny to leave him alone.

All through March and April, Angelo brooded, keeping to himself, fending off Kenny’s regular phone calls, rejecting Kenny’s suggestions to play pool or go cruising. He was relieved
that the police did not visit Kenny again, but he was uneasy. He had broken, he knew, his cardinal rule, never to confide in anyone. He thought about Kenny, and the more he thought, the more his hatred for his cousin grew. Kenny was ready for more scamming, it was obvious. The fool had no sense at all. No timing, no feel for the right rhythm of things, no nothing. If it hadn’t been for my dead cunt of a mother, Angelo thought, I never would have got involved with the jerk. Angelo was not inclined to introspection, but he sensed that he had overvalued Kenny’s usefulness, relied overmuch on his servility, been induced by his willingness to please into sharing entirely too much with him. It was over with Kenny. But how to convey the message? Killing him would be too risky; they were too much linked together. Ignoring him seemed to draw him on. He craved abuse. He was like a woman who failed to read the score. Kenny reminded Angelo a little of Antoinette Lombardo. You could knock her up, turn her into a whore, shit on her in every way possible, and still she came back for more, a faithful dog waiting for another kick to the chops.

Angelo daydreamed of shooting or knifing Kenny, strangling him. Kenny, Angelo feared, was the kind of guy who would babble his way into trouble sooner or later. But Angelo, silent, watchful, clung to life with reptilian tenacity. Angelo blunt and rooted, Kenny homeless and euphemistic and absurdly hopeful: theirs was like a conflict between the ancient and modern worlds, with little enough to choose between the two.

As if to emphasize his determination to put distance between himself and his cousin, Angelo married again on March 29, affirming his impulse to survive and to go on with his own, separate life. The bride was Tai-Fun Fanny Leung, twenty-one years old, born in Hong Kong. For her the marriage meant that she would be able to stay in the United States, and there was a practical advantage in the union for Angelo as well. Fanny’s parents were sending her money to buy a house, and Angelo figured he would find a way to get his hands on that.

One afternoon in April, Kenny dropped by, the rejected suitor still hoping for attention. He announced, as though it
were the end of something, that Kelli had abandoned him. She had gone up to Bellingham to be near her parents. It was terrible. His own son had been taken from him. How did Kelli expect the boy to grow up properly without the guidance of a father? What was wrong with women these days? Women’s liberation had gone too far. Pretty soon women would have no use for men at all. Something had to be done to wake society up.

Angelo half listened. He was working on a car in the shop, music on the radio. Kenny droned on.

“Why don’t you go up there?” Angelo said.

“What?”

“Follow the bitch, you love your son so much.”

“I couldn’t do that. What would I do? Leave L.A.? I’m going to the beach on Sunday with Sheryl.”

“You better follow Kelli.”

The more Angelo thought about it, the better the idea seemed. Getting Kenny away, out of the state. The guy was totally unreliable. Angelo wanted to be rid of him once and for all. He began encouraging Kenny to leave, but Kenny insisted that his future lay in California. Angelo pressed. At length he simply ordered Kenny to go. One day in May when Kenny was prattling about his psychology practice, how he was going to make it prosper at last, Angelo laid out the options simply and clearly. Either Kenny left the state, or Angelo would kill him. The evenness, the coolness, the directness with which Angelo delivered his ultimatum encouraged Kenny to pack his bags.

Still he dallied. He made a last stab at the psychology practice, placing an ad in the
Times
for an assistant. He listed his name as Dr. R. Johnson, gave the Verdugo address, and asked candidates with a degree in psychology to forward their college transcripts to him. He received several responses and selected the transcript of a Thomas Steven Walker, who held an M.A. degree in psychology from California State University at Northridge. Kenny, deciding that he ought to have college transcripts himself—with them he might land the very sort of a job he had offered Thomas Steven Walker—then sent a letter to the registrar at Cal State requesting “fully completed diplomas EXCEPT for my name. I have at additional expense retained a
caligrapher [sic] that will print my name in a fancy script of my own choosing.” He enclosed Walker’s transcripts, which he had xeroxed, substituting his own name on the copies, signed the letter with Walker’s name, and included a postal money order for ninety dollars. The registrar’s office, exhibiting a surprising lack of skepticism, cashed the money order.

But before he could receive his new diploma, Kenny realized that Angelo would no longer tolerate his presence in Los Angeles. Maybe Angelo would mellow later, but for now Kenny understood that he had better get out. It took all of his persuasive powers to talk Kelli into the idea of his joining her. On the telephone he told her that he had come to a crossroads in his life. The birth of Ryan had altered his consciousness. Much to his surprise, he found himself welcoming the responsibilities of fatherhood. He now had something to live for, to work for; it was not easy, but he had come to understand his way of life up to this point had been selfish. Only through love could a person fulfill himself. And sometimes a change of scene was just what the doctor ordered. He had never liked Los Angeles anyway. It was decadent. Everything he knew about her home town, Bellingham, made it seem like the wholesome sort of place he needed. Kelli acquiesced.