Hillside Stranglers (24 page)

“No. He did that on his own.”

“Were you there when it happened?”

“No.”

“How do you know he did it then, alone?”

“How?”

“How do you know?”

“Her dad came over here asking.”

“About what?”

“If Kenny was in the movies. I said I don’t know what he’s in, man. If he told you he’s in the movies, he must be in the movies.”

“Well, what did you think?”

“I think he was trying to, you know, fuck the guy out of something.”

“Well, you knew Kenny wasn’t in the movies. Did you tell her dad that?”

“No. I told her dad, if he said he was in the movies, I don’t know, ‘cause he came over and he asked me, you know, if your cousin was in the movies. I said wait, hey man, I don’t know what he does. I said but, ah, you know, check on it. If he’s in the movies, call the, you know, the studio.”

“Well,” Grogan switched back, “did you know either of those two girls, one who you said was Sabra?”

“Sabra.”

“Sabra and the other girl who you didn’t know the name of was probably Becky.”

“Becky was—” Angelo stopped himself. “Sabra’s friend was small. The girl was short. Short and thin.”

“Well, we’re doing a lot of fencing here with you, Angelo, and maybe, maybe we ought to stop fencing.”

“Yeah. This is bullshit. Ask what you want to ask.”

“And start telling you that we’ve talked to a lot of people.”

“I assume you did and they all called me, man. Everybody you talked to calls me.” Angelo was showing some irritation. Grogan hoped he was getting worried. “They went back over here and I talked to them.”

“Hey, Angelo,” Grogan said, “why don’t we tell you where we’re coming from, too?”

“Yes. Right.”

“Well, we don’t work prostitution or pimping or any of
those crimes. We work murders, so we really don’t care too much about prostitution unless it’s directly related to what we’re doing. Were you running broads?”

“Huh? No.”

“Were you running broads?”

“No, I wasn’t running broads. Kenny was running broads.”

“Okay, did you ever have any sex with Becky Spears or Sabra Hannan? Here at your house?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you aware how old they were?”

“Nope. The broads set up themselves.”

“Out of your house?”

“Out of my house.”

“And you knew it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You knew she was tricking out of your house?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“Which girl?”

“Yeah.”

“They both did.”

“They were both tricking out of your house.”

“Yeah, with Kenny’s help.”

“And Kenny was doing the pimping?”

“That’s right. I don’t have to pimp, man.”

Grogan brought up J. J. Fenway again but got nowhere. He moved on:

“How about a girl by the name of Peaches?”

“Sure.”

“Who is Peaches?”

“Peaches.”

“What’s her name?”

“I just know her by Peaches.”

“Is she a whore or what?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did she live here for a while or what?”

“She used to stay here.”

“Is she a black girl?”

“She is a Negro.”

Grogan went around with Angelo about Peaches but could not get him to pin down dates. The investigators had not found Peaches yet anyway and so had no idea what she might tell them. Angelo said that he thought she was probably someplace back East. Grogan had started to ask more about Kenny when a customer appeared.

While Angelo went out to deal with the customer, Grogan, first switching off his tape recorder, told Finnigan that he was going to try another approach:

“Okay, Pete. We’re gonna squeeze the bastard. You can tell he’s basically a coward. He’s already trying to put everything off on Bianchi. He acts cocky but underneath he’s yellow.”

Angelo came back into his office and sat down behind his desk. Grogan stared at him, saying nothing for half a minute. Then Grogan got up, walked slowly over to Angelo, looking down at him, bulking over him. He began:

“You know about politics, don’t you, Angelo? Right. Well see, we got a political problem here. We got one Strangler, we need to get the other, understand? And guess what. You’re it. We don’t even give a shit whether you did the murders or not, we’ve just decided you’re it, Angelo, so you better start copping out, because if you don’t, guess what, you’re it anyway. Get me? You talk, maybe you won’t get the gas chamber.”

Angelo said nothing. The color rose in Grogan’s face, and he started breathing heavily. Angelo showed some signs of alarm, looking down and away. I think I’ve got him, Grogan thought, I think the little shit is going to break. Suddenly Grogan reached down, grabbed Angelo by the shoulders, lifted him out of his seat, and screamed into his face, shaking him around like a toy:

“Listen, scumbag, you know what we know? Everything! No point wasting time! We know about Becky and we know about Sabra, we know about you beating them and threatening them and all of it! We got plenty to show you did the murders with your chickenshit little cousin! You keep shitting us you get the chamber, see, just like you electrocuted Lauren Wagner, just like you gassed Kristina Weckler!” He threw Angelo
back into the chair. “I can’t wait to watch you die, Angelo. We got enough on you now to fry you ten times. We know about David Wood, see, the lawyer you tried to fuck over. We even know where you picked up Judy Miller on Sunset, we got a guy saw you. You think Kenny’s not ratting on you? You better get him first! We got somebody saw you pick up Lauren Wagner with Kenny. We got three people saw it. Talk! You motherfucking son of a bitch!”

“I didn’t do no stranglings,” Angelo said. “I never killed nobody.”

Grogan knew then that he would never get Angelo to talk. For a moment there Angelo was so close to breaking, Grogan believed, so very close. But the only thing to do now was to get his lies on tape. If only I had just a little bit more on him, Grogan thought, I could break him. But the moment had passed. Grogan would have to play by the book from here on out.

“Okay,” Grogan said to Finnigan, “if that’s the way he wants it. Read him his rights.” Grogan took the tape recorder out of his pocket, laid it on the desk, and switched it on again. Finnigan began:

“Two-six-seventy-nine, six twenty p.m. We’re at 703 East Garfield.”

“Colorado,” Grogan corrected him.

“East Colorado, in Glendale. This is an interview with Angelo Buono, Jr.” He went on to tell Angelo that he had the right to remain silent, to be represented by an attorney, through the Public Defender’s Office if he could not afford one. “Do you understand these rights?”

“Yep.” Angelo had looked frightened during Grogan’s tirade, as though he wondered whether Grogan was about to execute him personally—correctly perceiving Grogan’s fondest wish. But during the reading of his rights, Angelo had regained his composure, seemed even to have gained strength from having withstood Grogan’s attack. He settled into his chair and started pulling on his earlobe, tilting his head as though he were about to entertain a business proposition.

“Okay,” Finnigan said, relighting his cigar. “Do you want to discuss with us—”

“I will discuss anything you want to discuss.”

“Without an attorney being present?”

“Why not?” Angelo lit up a Kool.

“Okay. Fine.”

“That good enough?” It was as though Angelo wanted the detectives to think that he was doing them a favor. It took effort for Grogan to keep from bursting out again. His rage had been strategic, but it had not been an act. Watching Angelo, he thought of the Wecklers and the Wagners and wondered why anyone would think that this animal deserved constitutional rights when he had already forfeited his right to live. Simple execution was too good for him. He should be tortured first, have done to him what he had done to those girls, then killed and left in the desert to rot and be picked apart by buzzards.

Finnigan and Grogan now alternated asking Angelo questions. They started fresh, establishing that he knew Kenneth Bianchi and that Bianchi had lived with him at this address in 1976. Angelo fudged on Kenny’s subsequent moves about town, but he admitted having been in the East Garfield and Tamarind apartments.

“Two times I went [to Tamarind], there was a girl there he was living with, a fat girl.”

“Do you know Kelli?” Finnigan asked.

“Kelli?”

“The one that had his baby.”

“Right. She was there two times or three times when I was there.”

Angelo verified that Kenny had worked for a land title company and had applied to the LAPD Reserves, going on citizen ride-alongs. He acknowledged that Kenny had mentioned a Sergeant Mike Rhine in connection with his police applications. This explained to Grogan and Finnigan Bianchi’s use of the name Mike Ryan when he had telephoned the Climax outcall service to lure Kimberly Martin. Sergeant Rhine had already said that people often confused his name with Ryan, and
he remembered Bianchi as an applicant. If they weren’t getting much on Buono, Grogan and Finnigan knew, at least they were building a good case against Bianchi. If they could do that, then it remained to tie the two cousins together. Grogan, not yet knowing about the inspirational role of a soap opera in the naming of Bianchi’s son but having heard the boy’s name, wondered whether Bianchi had been perverse enough to call his son after Sergeant “Ryan.”

Angelo denied ever having owned a badge. He admitted having had handcuffs but said he had thrown them away when the key had broken off in them. Bianchi, he said, had never seen them. He denied having nude pictures of girls to show to customers: “No, I got girls with clothes on.” He admitted having often ridden in Kenny’s Cadillac and he remembered that the county seal on the windshield had come from one of his customers, a county employee. Had he ever seen Kenny with a police badge?

“He had something, but I could never swear it was a police badge ’cause you could go down to the swap meet and buy them. . . . They had everything in there, man, you could buy anything you wanted to. That’s why I asked you guys, tell me something besides a badge ’cause those things are Mickey Mouse things, you can buy them all over town, man.”

Had Kenny, Grogan asked, ever passed himself off “as a professional person, like an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor that you know of?”

“Yeah.”

“Psychologist, psychiatrist?”

“Something like that, but then, maybe that ain’t, it’s something close to it, office he had or he was sharing or something with some guy, a professional guy, out in North Hollywood.” He had visited the office. “And Kenny had things hanging on the wall like this other guy, certificates and things.”

Grogan began turning the interview toward the Hillside Stranglings:

“Have you ever been to Forest Lawn Drive with Kenny Bianchi? Do you know where Forest Lawn Cemetery is off the Golden State Freeway?”

“Oh yeah. I take it go, when I go to Hollywood to visit my friend, I take that for a shortcut. . . . We might have took that road going to Hollywood or out there somewhere.” It was faster than other roads, Angelo said.

Grogan and Finnigan named other locations: Angeles Crest, the Eagle Rock Plaza, La Crescenta. He had visited them all, Angelo said, with friends, with his children.

Grogan wanted to know what kind of a guy Kenny Bianchi was. Angelo provided this character analysis:

“Like I told you before, the guy’d give you the shirt off his back, he really would. You know, but he changed on me, he’d be a real nice guy when he wanted something and if he wants something and you don’t give it to him, then he’d get upset, okay? He never got upset with me because, you know, I never had any reason to get him upset. You know, I used to loan him money, he’d pay me back. I’d never push him for the money because I knew he’d get kind of upset with me.”

“Were you afraid of him? Did he have a bad temper?”

“Yeah, he had a bad temper. And I figure, you know, life is too short to get, you know, in a hassle for what, ten dollars, five dollars. I’d rather forget about it. Then don’t loan him the money next time, see?”

Grogan showed Angelo photographs of the victims, one by one, naming them and asking Angelo if he knew them or recognized them:

Judy Miller:

“No.”

Yolanda Washington:

“I probably saw her before. I might have saw her on TV. She’s one of the girls who got strangled. . . . They had her picture on TV.”

Dolly Cepeda:

“Kenny didn’t bring her over . . . this girl was on TV.”

Sonja Johnson:

“No, I don’t know this girl. I think she was on TV, I’m not sure. They had a bunch of pictures on TV.”

Lissa Kastin:

“She was on TV.”

Jane King:

“No, she was on TV. This girl was on TV.”

Kristina Weckler:

“I think she was on TV. I ain’t sure.”

Lauren Wagner:

“No. She might’ve been on TV. I ain’t sure.”

Kim Martin:

“I don’t think I know her. I think she was on TV.”

Cindy Hudspeth:

“She was on TV.”

They pressed him on whether he had ever met Cindy Hudspeth, but he denied it. Grogan then asked Angelo specifically whether he was involved in or had anything to do with the Hillside Strangler murders, and Angelo denied it:

“Any knowledge I have is by the media.”

Finnigan asked him whether he thought it possible that Ken Bianchi could have been involved in the Hillside Strangler cases.

“Could be, like I said before, you never know, the guy’s mind could have jumped time or he might have had a revenge.”

Grogan wanted to know whether, in watching coverage on television and in reading the papers, Angelo had formed any opinions about the Hillside Strangler.

“I don’t buy no paper. Okay. Only thing I would know by the news media is with the TV if I don’t fall asleep by eleven.” But he went on to offer this interpretation: “I commented to friends of mine when they brought the subject up, and I said, you know, why didn’t they look at two girls doing it or a guy and a girl. Because, you know, usually a girl will jump in the car quicker with a guy or a man and a woman in the car than with two dudes. Or she would jump in a car with two girls much easier. I don’t hitchhike myself, never have. And you know, when a girl hitchhikes, she’s taking her life in her hands, man, she doesn’t know who she’s getting in the car with. It could be a guy escaped from a crazy house and stole a car and driving down the street and see a girl hitchhiking and pick her up. What I tell my own daughter, my own kids, even my boys and they can take care of themselves. I don’t even do it.”