Hillside Stranglers (26 page)

“But I would like to kind of talk to you. And I’ve talked a bit to Ken, but I think that perhaps there might be another part of Ken that I haven’t talked to, another part that maybe feels somewhat differently from the part that I’ve talked to. And I would like to communicate with the other part. . . . Part, would you please come to communicate to me? . . . And when you’re here, lift that left hand off the chair to signal to me that you are here. Would you please come, Part, so I can talk to you. Another Part, it is not just the same as the part of Ken I’ve been talking to. . . . Part, would you come and lift Ken’s left hand to indicate to me that you are here?”

Slowly Kenny raised his left hand.

“All right,” Dr. Watkins soothed. “Part, I would like for you and I to talk together—we don’t even have to—we don’t
have to talk to Ken unless you and Ken want to. But I would like for you to talk to me. Will you talk to me by saying ‘I’m here’? Would you communicate with me, Part? Would you talk with me, Part, by saying, ‘I’m here’?

“Yes,” Kenny said, his voice lower than normal.

“Part, are you the same thing as Ken or are you different in any way? Talk a little louder so I can hear you. Huh?”

“I’m not him,” Kenny said.

“You’re not him. Who are you? Do you have a name?”

“I’m not Ken.”

“You’re not Ken. Okay. Who are you? Tell me about yourself.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a name I can call you by?”

“Steve.”

“Huh?”

“You can call me Steve.”

“I can call you Steve, okay. Steve, just stay where you are, make yourself comfortable in the chair and I’d like to talk to you. You’re not Ken. Tell me about yourself, Steve. What do you do?”

Kenny had had plenty of time to think up the right answer to that question. He sat slumped in the chair with his head bowed and swaying, feigning hypnotic drowsiness, sensing that his moment had come. He knew the evidence against him in Bellingham, and he knew that by this time both he and Angelo were prime suspects in Los Angeles. Finnigan and Salerno, who had been identified to him as Los Angeles detectives, were looking on. He knew that he now had to establish an alter personality at odds with himself, and so he answered straight away:

“I hate him.”

“You what?”

“I hate him.”

“You hate him. You mean Ken,” Dr. Watkins asked helpfully.

“I hate Ken.”

“You hate Ken. Why do you hate Ken?”

“He tries to be nice,” Kenny said, letting his head roll around.

“He tries to be nice. I see. Well, tell me about, how do you mean—”

“I hate a lot of people.”

“You hate a lot of people.”

“He tried to be friends.”

“He tried to be friends. Who do you hate?”

“I hate my mother.”

Having put in place that foundation stone of analysis, Kenny rushed ahead to construct a conflict between Ken and Steve and to establish that Steve had forced Ken to commit the Hillside Stranglings:

“I fixed [Ken] good when he went to California.”

“How’d you do? How do you mean? What’d you do?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Huh?”

“I can’t tell you. You’d tell Ken.”

“He won’t tell me,” Dr. Watkins said, “so you got to tell me.”

“I was with him one night,” and Kenny paused to laugh, rather sneeringly, rather like a movie-version psychopathic killer. “He walked in on his cousin Angelo.”

“Yeah?”

“And Angelo had a girl over,” Kenny laughed again.

“Yeah.”

“Ken walked in in the middle of Angelo killing this girl.”

“Walked in on the middle of what?”

“Angelo killing this girl. I made him feel like he was a part of it.”

“Now, who’s Angelo?”

“Ah, some turkey he knows. His cousin.”

Not content with supplying, along with his psychological alibi, the link between himself and Angelo, Kenny quickly went on to explain how Steve had supplied Ken with a motive, one neatly consistent with basic psychological theory as derived from Freud:

“I made [Ken] think all these real morbid thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“Ah, like there was nothing wrong with killing ’cause it was like getting back at his mother, and I made sure he didn’t really know what was going on. . . .”

“Did he go kill a number of them?”

“Yeah. He—I made him do it.”

“You made him do it.”

“He thought it was his mother, and he thought it was people he hated.” This was a slip, since Kenny, as Steve, had already said that Ken did not hate anyone and was always trying to be nice, but if Dr. Watkins noticed the slip he said nothing about it.

“Yeah,” Dr. Watkins said. “You fooled him.”

“Oh, yeah, he couldn’t figure out later what he had done and why.” Here Kenny laughed again for effect.

“Did he forget it then that he did it, or not?”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t let him remember that. . . . I made him strangle them all.”

Kenny then went on to say that Steve had also made Ken strangle the girls in Bellingham. He made one more slip. In response to Dr. Watkins’s saying that he must like to kill women more than men, Kenny, forgetting for a split second the distinction he had established between the two selves, explained why:

“ ’Cause Ken hates women.” But he caught himself, quickly interjecting: “I mean, I hate women.” Again, if Dr. Watkins noticed the discrepancy, he said nothing about it. For good measure, Kenny had Steve say that he wanted to kill Ken, and he would make Ken die, somehow, echoing the dialogue from the film when Marsha says she wants to kill Sybil.

As he brought the hypnosis session to a close, Dr. Watkins gave Steve, or Part, or Kenny as Steve, or whatever Kenny had wrought, all the credibility Kenny could have wished for:

“Well, Steve,” Dr. Watkins said, “I guess you can go back where you need to go. Just go back and sit down.” Kenny was
already sitting down. Had Steve been standing all this time? Can one personality sit while the other stands? Kenny, at any rate, stayed seated. “And I want to talk to Ken. You can stay under hypnosis, but Ken, I want to talk to you. Will you come back? When you’re here, say ‘I’m here.’ ”

“I’m here,” Kenny said.

“Ken, do you know anything about Steve?”

“Steve,” Kenny said, drawing out the vowel, knitting his brow.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“Who’s Steve? . . .”

Dr. Watkins told Kenny that “during the coming weeks” he would come to know more about Steve and in so doing become “stronger and stronger and stronger with each passing day,” while Steve would become “weaker and weaker and weaker.” He, Ken, would find out more and more “through thoughts, memories, dreams, and so forth” until he fully understood “what has happened.” He would have more energy: “. . . more of the energy of your whole body is going to flow into Ken, give him strength and courage and memory, until pretty soon, there is just Ken. Do you understand that?”

“Okay.”

Dr. Watkins counted to five, telling Kenny that he would be wide awake and alert. “Open your eyes.”

“Hi,” Kenny said, shaking his head. “God, what happened? I feel in a daze.”

Dr. Watkins told him that he would come to understand in his own way, through his own strength, that it would be up to him to discover himself.

“Okay. Real good,” Kenny said. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

Watching all this, Frank Salerno wrote down in his note-book a succinct judgment:
“Bullshit.”
That evening he and Pete Finnigan went to dinner with some members of the Bellingham P.D. at the Bellingham Yacht Club. Over many drinks they discussed what had happened, how Dr. Watkins had appeared to swallow the whole act, how Bianchi had slipped up a couple of times, forgetting whether Ken or Steve was supposed
to be the good guy. When they telephoned Grogan to tell him what was going on, Grogan said:

“Okay, I got a great idea. The judge says to Bianchi, ‘Mr. Bianchi, I tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to let Ken off. Ken is acquitted. But Steve gets the chair.’ ”

The detectives, sickened as they were by the prospects of having an insanity plea by Bianchi, could take some solace in his having finally fingered Angelo Buono. In anticipation of this break, Salerno had already contacted Markust Camden, tracing the itinerant bounty hunter all the way to Indiana a week after Bianchi’s arrest. Salerno had several telephone conversations with Camden, who complained of problems with a wife or girlfriend; Salerno, commiserating with him, got Camden to agree to come to Los Angeles at some future date for another interview. Informed about Bianchi’s arrest, Camden said that he recalled Judy Miller’s introducing him to a “Kenny” at the hot dog stand in Hollywood, a guy who she had said was “strange” and “liked sex a lot.” This turned out to be a false lead, but on April 11, during a break in the Bellingham psychiatric evaluations, Salerno got Camden a plane ticket to Los Angeles and
flew down to interview him at the Gala Inn motel on Figueroa Street downtown.

Salerno arrived prepared with two mug runs—each a lineup of six photographs of male faces arranged in two rows of three—one run including a picture of Bianchi, the other one of Buono. Camden failed to respond to the run that included Bianchi, but when shown the other, he pointed immediately to the middle picture on the top row. “That’s your man,” Camden said. It was Angelo. Then Salerno showed Camden a blowup of the photograph of Angelo. How sure was he that this man was the one Camden had described earlier as a Puerto Rican who had driven Judy Miller away from the railroad diner in a limousine?

“I’m positive,” Camden said. He added that he would be willing to affirm the identification under oath in court. Salerno put Camden on the plane back to Indiana, asking him to keep in touch if he moved again. He would definitely be needed at the trial.

All this was promising except for one unfortunate factor. Camden had been staying at the Richmond State Hospital in Indiana, a mental hospital. He had checked himself in, he said, voluntarily because he had become upset about troubles with his wife. To Salerno, Camden’s stay in the mental hospital did not compromise his credibility—his story was the same as it had been before, and he had picked out Buono’s picture with no hesitation whatsoever—but a defense lawyer might make something of it. Nothing about this case was simple.

At about the same time, Bob Grogan called again on Beulah Stofer—his seventy-fifth visit to her, Grogan estimated. He too had mug runs, but as soon as he suggested to Mrs. Stofer that she try to pick out one or both of the men whom she had seen abducting Lauren Wagner, she started wheezing and asked Grogan to leave. Grogan immediately withdrew, but in the next few days called her repeatedly, trying to calm her and telling her that she was in no danger but that what she knew was vital to the conviction of Lauren’s killer. Grogan tried everything with her, but she was too frightened to cooperate, and she said
she was worried that her asthma was getting worse. But finally she agreed to try to help. It had been her doctor, she said, who had convinced her. She had confessed to him what was on her mind, preying on her, and the doctor had advised her to go ahead and try to help the police. Holding back was making her condition worse, the doctor said. Her health required her opening up.

Again Grogan sat with her, soothing her, chatting aimlessly about anything that came to his mind, and then he brought out the mug runs. She immediately picked out both Buono and Bianchi.

Although from one point of view Mrs. Stofer had now become twice as good a witness as Camden—she picked out both suspects and was a more credible sort of person—from another point of view she posed serious problems. Grogan still could not get her to say what he believed was the truth: that she had gone outside her house to get a very close look. She had poor eyesight, and it was doubtful that a jury would believe that she could have seen Buono and Bianchi clearly enough through her window to identify them, particularly at night, when light reflections from inside would have made seeing even more difficult. Worse, shrubbery had begun to grow up in the yard near the fence, obscuring the view of the street, and by the time of a trial it might obscure it completely. And what would happen to her on the stand? She might have an asthmatic seizure and collapse entirely.

Meanwhile, Kenny, performing again as Steve for Dr. Watkins, added that the killings had taken place at Angelo’s house, named Kristina Weckler as a neighbor at the Garfield apartments, alluded to dump sites off the Golden State Freeway, and spoke of alternating with Angelo in doing the actual stranglings.

He improved his characterization of Steve, building on his received hypothesis that Steve was supposed to be an alter ego, as opposite as possible from the kindly Ken. He added sprinklings of profanity—“They’re fucking bugging me, damn it, leave me alone! Fuck what a drag, you know I just want to be me! Fucking shrinks!”—and a snarl to his delivery; and he
laughed frequently, like the villain in a melodrama. The more extreme this bizarre impersonation became, the phonier it appeared to Salerno and Finnigan. Salerno wrote “bullshit” twice more in his notebook. But Dr. Watkins showed not a sign of disbelief.

Ken, Steve spat, was “an asshole” and “a motherfucker” whom Steve controlled totally. Steve had tricked or forced Ken into bad habits, not only murder but “thinking dirty” and smoking cigarettes. Kenny also had Steve develop a spontaneous case of faulty grammar—“We didn’t keep no tabs”—and turned on the sympathetic, solicitous Dr. Watkins, calling him “a drag.”

“All right,” Dr. Watkins shrugged, “I’m a drag. I’m sorry.”

The primary source of Kenny’s creative characterization of Steve was Angelo Buono, the one person he had ever been close to who acted consistently like a classic tough guy and who certainly could be said to have functioned as Kenny’s alter ego in Los Angeles. Angelo was indeed the perfect model for Steve, so like any artist Kenny was able to draw a character from life. But art too begets art, and Kenny also had in his mind the example of Sally Field portraying one of Sybil’s alter egos as a rough-edged prostitute, the flying nun become a whore. Although his theatrical methodology was sound enough and his performance was convincing to Dr. Watkins, Kenny would never have passed a screen test. Or, to be fair to him, his acting never rose above the level of a primitive television series or the outsized gestures of the villain in an old B western. He might have been cast for a minor part in a high school production of
Guys and Dolls.
Still, as they say in Hollywood, you don’t argue with success.

When Dr. Watkins dismissed Steve again for the day—“Well, nice talking to you, Steve. Why don’t you just go wherever you need to go. I’d kind of like to talk to Ken now”—Kenny switched back immediately to his accustomed role as Mr. Nice Guy:

“Nice talking to
you.
Thank you, doctor. Have a nice trip, now.”

Although he had now betrayed Angelo, Kenny had not
done so without deliberation. After his arrest his first impulse had been to cement the pact of silence with Angelo and, he hoped, to use his cousin as a character reference just as he had done on job applications. Between the two of them, Kenny thought, alibis at least for the Los Angeles killings could be cooked up. He quickly wrote Angelo a letter alluding to their family ties. But Angelo’s response had been a phone call to Kenny threatening to kill Kelli and Ryan if Kenny snitched. (Angelo used cryptic language, assuming that the jailhouse phone was bugged, which it was not, but Kenny got the message. When Kenny later disclosed the threatening call, Grogan and Finnigan knew that they had caught Angelo in another lie, since he had denied contacting Kenny in Bellingham.) On February 27, Kenny tried to reach Angelo indirectly. “Dear Mom and Dad,” Kenny wrote to his mother and her second husband:

Angelo took me in sight unseen [in 1976]. He’s a loner and took me in. He may have been a criminal years ago, but he’s got two.[?] legitimate businesses and although not always Kosher, he’s not a terrible egg. None of us are perfect. I want you to call him for me, see how he’s doing. I wrote him to say hi. Tell him this, that I wish he could write the letter I asked him to write. . . .

P.S. Don’t tell Kelli. She dislikes Angelo because he used to tease her all the time.

Had Kelli known what Angelo had threatened she would have had a better reason to dislike him.

When even this roundabout approach to Angelo failed to produce so much as a friendly note—Angelo was not about to “say hi” to his accomplice—Kenny knew that his only hope to save himself lay in implicating Angelo; if he could incorporate the betrayal into the multiple personality act, he might walk. But, like almost anyone facing possible execution, Kenny was willing to try anything, and he could hardly be sure the multiple personality scheme would work. An alibi would be even
better. He wrote again to his mother, this time enclosing a crudely hand-printed, supposedly anonymous letter that implicated a boyfriend of one of the murdered Bellingham girls. He implored his mother to fly to Seattle and mail the faked letter from there to the Bellingham police. She did not comply with her son’s request, although she did come to Bellingham to see him. Alone and face to face with him, she could only weep, unable to doubt his guilt, feeling sorry for him but ashamed. Eventually she broke down and told the police that her son had been a liar as far back as she could remember.

But Kenny, ever resourceful, tried another woman. Angie Kinneberg, one of the girls to whom he had sent Christmas flowers in Bellingham, came to see him in jail, and he managed to slip letters to her, fifty-seven in all, and three postcards. He begged her to give him an alibi, to say that he had been with her on the night of the Bellingham murders: “If I had come over I could have you testify under oath of my whereabouts Thursday night. I have no alibi from 8:10 till 9:50 p.m.” To Angie he maintained his innocence: “I could never take another’s life. I was set up . . . I keep dreaming like an old Perry
Mason show that all of a sudden somebody steps up to say I was with them the night in question.” “Please help me if you can, I’m begging for my life. When I read the autopsy reports I became sick. Karen was a nice girl when I knew her several months ago. I’d like to get my hands on who did this to these girls.” “If you can find the strength in your heart to help me you can include the times in your letter along with the place.” To try to tempt her, he began talking to her about collaborating on a book about himself and alluded to a possible hundred-thousand-dollar advance. He professed his love for her and, of course, proposed marriage. Angie told Kenny’s mother about the proposal; his mother said that Kenny would never get out of prison, so Angie might as well accept to make him happy.

Angie did go so far as to write Kenny a note that provided him an alibi, but, conscience-stricken, she told Dean Brett that it was a lie and asked him to tear it up. As Kenny’s multiple personality ruse began to look as if it might work, he dropped the search for an alibi and admitted to Angie that his “other
self” might have done the killings. He had been merely a “watchful voyeur.” He could never take a life. That was the reason he had avoided going into the army. Even the thought of something like prostitution “turns me off. I’ve never condoned the selling of one’s body for any reason. The body to me is sacred and I’m not even religious.” He asked her to go to the library and read up on everything she could find on multiple personalities, to help him understand himself, he said. At the same time he began seeing a Catholic priest, Father Don Warner, and spoke of regaining his faith. Father Warner gave him a rosary, and Kenny began carrying it and displaying it during subsequent interviews with psychiatrists.

Two more doctors arrived to interview him, one at the request of the court, the other called by the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, but since neither employed hypnosis Kenny had to keep Steve under wraps. He concentrated on trying to depict his mother as “very stern on punishment,” mindful that he had to appear to have been an abused child, and on inventing Sybil-like dreams. Like Sybil and Eve, he also announced that he was suffering from headaches.

To add to these orchestrated impressions, Kenny began keeping a diary, knowing that it would be read by his doctors. He managed to write down something in it almost every day, and by the time he was finished with it he had scribbled more than twenty-five thousand phony words. He emphasized lurid dreams modeled on Sybil’s dreams, with recurring themes of entrapment, pursuit, violence, visions of escape or death. And he made sure to mention his mother frequently, always portraying her as a villain, himself as her victim.

Kenny’s approach to his situation was something like that of a spy caught behind enemy lines. He knew what role he was supposed to play if his captors were finally to be convinced that he was genuinely what he was trying to appear to be. He knew the value that the enemy would place on documentation. If the documents were lacking, he would supply them:

I was running down a dark hallway—I could see a light at the end—but I wasn’t reaching it for some reason—I ran
and ran and finally reached the end of the hallway, lighted and I couldn’t move forward.

At an amusement park I was on a roller coaster ride, it never seemed to end.

He varied entries about such dreams with complaints of headaches, and since he knew it was vital that the doctors perceive him as helpless, he added vignettes of himself as a timid little tyke:

There was a song popular on the radio—I used to be afraid to go to bed at night—the name was “one-eyed, one-eared flying purple people-eater.” My mother controlled all my relationships.

Occasionally his prose approached babytalk:

. . . for a while I had a pet duck—until it grew too big. I used to like to pick those flowers that if you suck on them they were so sweet. I remember having to go to bed if I didn’t eat everything. . . . When I was sick once my aunt brought me 4 books. I remember being disappointed because she didn’t bring me a toy.