Hillside Stranglers (30 page)

The next morning, preparing Kenny for the appearance of Billy, Dr. Allison told Bianchi to imagine that he had inside of himself a special force, almost like another person, whom he was to call Inner Self Helper, or Ish, for short. Ish would help him get in contact with Billy. Ish was strong and not a bit neurotic. Was he ready? All right:

“So now we want you to call out Billy. He’s back in there. He must respond to your call, and I want to hear both of you this time because I don’t want only one side of the conversation. You call, ‘Billy! Come on, Billy. I want to talk to you, Billy.’ ”

“Billy?” Kenny called. “Billy? Billy? Nothing, Dr. Allison.”

Dr. Allison now assumed the voice of a kindly but firm schoolmaster:

“Billy? You get in there! Get in there right behind his eyeballs and you answer Ken’s questions. Enough of this hiding! Time to get to work! I’ve never met you, but that’s not important. . . . Get your rear end up there and get to work!”

“Nothing, Dr. Allison,” Kenny said, teasing the eager doctor.

“Come on out, Billy! Billy! Come on, Billy.” Now Dr. Allison sounded like a man calling a puppy dog. “Come on out, Billy! I know about you, Billy.
I know you met with Dr. Orne!”
Still Billy refused to budge. “Come on, Billy. Come on, Billy. Come on, Billy. Come on, Billy. Now is not the time to be shy, Billy! Come on out, Billy. Billy. Come on, Billy. Come on, Billy. Come on out, Billy.”

Kenny, who had been sitting slumped, eyes half closed, now began to stir, raise his head. He looked Dr. Allison vaguely in the eye.

“You are Billy!” Dr. Allison said happily.

“Dr. Allison,” Kenny said, very much like Stanley meeting Dr. Livingstone. This was a slip. Billy was not supposed to know who Dr. Allison was. But Dr. Allison corrected:

“You have not seen me before, have you?”

“Glad to meet you. No, sir.”

“You hid out the last time I was here.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. Just curious.”

“Will you sign in, please?” Dr. Allison handed Kenny a pencil. It was just like the old TV show
What’s My Line?
Kenny signed “Billy” on a piece of paper in childish script. It seemed to satisfy Dr. Allison.

Before he was through, Dr. Allison found yet another personality, which Kenny called Friend. Now there were Ken, Steve, Billy, Friend, and, if you wanted to count him, Ish. Quite a crew.

But Dr. Allison wanted to make sure that all these personalities would not disappear again. He made each one of them promise that he would return if summoned, even if asked to emerge by another doctor. Ken and Steve and Billy all promised
to come back, and Friend promised to help. To dramatize this, Bianchi conducted a conversation among all of them: “Just call me,” Steve said, “and I’ll come out, if it’s okay with you.” “Okay,” Ken said, “now I want to talk to Billy. Billy? Are you there?” “Yeah, Ken. What can I do for you?” And so on. Dr. Allison was delighted. Now would all the fellows write notes on pieces of paper?

“Sure. It’s okay with me, doc,” Kenny said. He scrawled a few lines for each personality, each in a different handwriting.

“A good job, Ken!” Dr. Allison said. “All hunky-dory!”

Alone in his cell the next day, Kenny, his hopes once more up, wrote in his diary.

Had my second visit with Dr. Allison. Accomplished a lot.

“Those whipsock shrinks!” Bob Grogan cried after he had seen the new series of Allison-Bianchi tapes. “Too bad the Marx Brothers aren’t still making pictures! I’d buy the rights myself!”

Grogan was enjoying a couple of cocktails with friends at the Nightwatch, washing his rage in laughter and Jameson’s.

“You heard of
The Three Faces of Eve?
I call this one
The Four Assholes of Bianchi.
Let’s see. Groucho would play Steve, right? Chico, he always had a scam going, he’d play Ken. And Harpo would be a natural for Billy, you know, shy, can’t talk, sensitive. Zeppo, he never did much anyhow, he could play Friend. Wait a minute. I forgot about Ish. Fuck, I could play Inner Self Helper. I come out and jerk everybody off. It couldn’t miss. Call Paramount! Get me Zanuck! And we’ll hire Allison and Watkins as technical advisers. A laugh a minute. Get Angelo to direct—he knows all the right moves. I tell you,
I’ve worked hundreds of homicides. This is the first one started out a tragedy and ends up a fucking farce!”

Grogan was laughing, but as he left the bar early that morning he took out his .38 and shot out two streetlamps.

After that episode Grogan started leaving his gun in the trunk of his car. He did not like carrying it anyway and saw his shooting out the lights as proof of his belief that if you were wearing a gun you were all too likely to use it. He would wear it when the time came to arrest Buono or if some other threatening occasion turned up, but for now he would leave it in the car. A couple of months later someone jimmied his trunk and stole his gun. Whatever could go wrong in this case, he thought, would. He was surprised the thief had not stolen the car as well.

In Bellingham, Bianchi spent two more days with Dr. Lunde and then the doctors were through with him. He stopped writing in his diary as soon as the doctors were no longer there to read it.

Dean Brett entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and the doctors presented their findings. Drs. Watkins and Allison agreed that Bianchi suffered from multiple personality disorder and was not competent to stand trial. Had their advice been followed, Kenny would have spent some time in a mental hospital and then would have been released, when it was determined that his personalities had been “integrated” into one big happy Bianchi.

But Drs. Faerstein and Orne stated unequivocally that Bianchi should stand trial, and Dr. Orne’s systematic dissection of Kenny’s act proved decisive. Salerno and Finnigan’s discovery that Steve Walker was an actual person living in Van Nuys and not inside Bianchi was also important, although the multiple personality advocates argued that multiples often took the names of alter personalities from real life.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office offered Kenny a deal. If he pled guilty to the Washington murders and to some of the Hillside Stranglings, he would get life with the possibility of parole and he would be able to serve his time in
California, where the prisons were supposedly more humane than in Washington. Washington’s Walla Walla State Prison had the reputation of being one of the most brutal in America. In return, Bianchi was to agree to testify truthfully and fully against his cousin Angelo Buono.

For Bianchi the choice was between death in Washington or life in California. Since this time the life involved was his own, he chose life. Besides, Kenny thought, plea bargaining was also a way for him to buy time. You never could tell what might happen in the months to come. To test his credibility and his willingness to talk, the Los Angeles detectives would now interview him in the Whatcom County Jail. If he proved a cooperative witness, the plea bargain would be formally signed. Kenny braced himself for interrogations he knew would be less pleasant than the ones with the doctors.

Bob Grogan was delighted that he would now get the chance to question Bianchi face to face, but he wondered how much he would be able to extract from a man for whom lying seemed not second nature but first. Grogan went over everything that was known about the Wagner and Weckler killings. It was about these that he would be the primary interrogator, and he would have to be able to check everything Bianchi said against the known facts. And to further prepare himself, Grogan went to talk to a psychiatrist friend of his, a man who worked for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. What chance was there, Grogan asked his friend, that Bianchi would now tell the truth? A very good chance, Grogan’s friend replied. A man like that, fighting for his life, might well tell the truth now. But only once. He might, he probably would tell the truth now; but after that, in the weeks to come, he would start lying again and would probably contradict everything. Grogan had better get it all down the first time, because that would be it.

All the principal investigators, including one sergeant from the Glendale P.D., now gathered in Bellingham to interview Bianchi in the county jail. Roger Kelly, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who had been assigned to the case, also came up to Bellingham to participate in the interviewing, and this annoyed Grogan. He did not like Kelly personally, and it
was his opinion that Kelly’s reputation as a skillful prosecutor of murderers was ill-deserved. Kelly had an excellent record of achieving convictions, but Grogan believed that Kelly avoided difficult cases, taking only those that offered a great deal of incontrovertible physical evidence. Grogan felt that Kelly did not have the will or the stamina to pursue a case in which most of the evidence was circumstantial and in which the principal witness was both an accomplice and an accomplished liar. Grogan, being Grogan, made no secret of his opinions, which Kelly denied publicly and vehemently.

Grogan hoped for the best. If he and the detectives did a good job of getting Bianchi’s confessions, they might overcome what he perceived as Kelly’s deficiencies. Their chief hope was that Bianchi would tell them things which he could not have known without participating with Angelo in the stranglings; they also hoped that Bianchi would supply them with new information which could help to convict Angelo. Under California law, the accused could not be convicted
solely
on the testimony of an accomplice; but if the accomplice’s testimony was corroborated by other evidence, direct or circumstantial, it could be used to convict.

The first interview, conducted by Williams and Varney, dealt with Yolanda Washington, and it was not promising. Bianchi, although maintaining his typically polite, mild manner, gave no motive for the original Hillside Strangling other than his and Angelo’s desire to get sex from a prostitute without paying for it. He refused to acknowledge that the turquoise ring found in his Bellingham house belonged to Yolanda, and he said that when they had dumped the body, they had covered it with a big log. No log had been found on or near the body. The officers pressed, but Kenny insisted that there had been a log.

Salerno and Finnigan, however, got better results when they questioned Bianchi for two days about Judy Miller. His description of the abduction from the railroad diner jibed with everything Markust Camden had said, with one irritating discrepancy: Camden had described the car as a limousine and
had said that Kenny’s Cadillac had not been the car when Salerno had shown him a photograph of it. Kenny insisted that he and Angelo had used the Cadillac that night. It may have been, Salerno and Finnigan thought, that Camden simply took the big four-door Caddy for a limousine and then failed to recognize it from the photograph, but any inconsistencies in Camden’s statement might spell trouble.

Salerno and Finnigan were highly detailed in their questions. They wanted to know what kind of rope or cord had been used, how long the strangulation had taken, whose idea it had been to perform this or that act. Of great interest to Salerno was Kenny’s account of how Judy Miller had been blindfolded and with what sort of material: the wisp of fiber Salerno had taken from Judy Miller’s eyelid had yet to be traced. When Bianchi said that he believed it was a kind of foam Angelo used in his work, Salerno knew that a most important piece of evidence might now materialize.

Salerno and Finnigan concealed their revulsion as Kenny recounted every detail of the killing with no more emotion than someone talking about what he had eaten for lunch. The cool, inflectionless voice; the way Bianchi said “Judy Miller” over and over again, running the syllables together, indifferently, with utter detachment, as though the girl had been a thing, a toy of no consequence—it was chilling and, at last, incomprehensible. They could tell a little about his thought processes from his grammar: always he discussed his actions in the third person unless he was asked specifically about what he himself was actually doing at one point or another. “I’m squatted down. My butt is around the area of her knees, which would put my knees in the area of her chest. I did this and simultaneously he put the bag over her head.” But “she was squirming and arching her back and groaning and making noises, you know . . . the bag was put over her head . . . the body was placed . . . ” as though something or someone other than himself had been doing all of this.

Salerno managed to elicit vital circumstantial evidence from Bianchi about the dump site.

“When we first went through this,” Salerno said, “you were having difficulty recalling the dump site, and then something triggered in your mind about why that dump site was picked.”

“His girlfriend,” Bianchi said.

Salerno already knew that this was Melinda Hooper. He asked Bianchi who this girlfriend was.

“I don’t know if it was his girlfriend. Some girl he knew, or he had gone over there to dinner. He knew the location. I don’t know her name.”

“Tell us about that. How do you know he knew? What conversation led you to believe?”

“ ’Cause I asked him how he knew the spot and he pointed down the street and he said, ‘Down there is the house where this girl, I’ve been over there to dinner and I know her father.’ He’s either taken her out or wanted to take her out or something like that. She was apparently really attractive. She was young.”

Salerno pressed him for several minutes, then showed him a photograph of Melinda Hooper’s house, which Bianchi identified as the one Angelo had pointed out.

Bianchi also told Salerno and Finnigan about trying to pick up Peter Lorre’s daughter. This was something entirely new; they would check it out, along with a few other leads Kenny volunteered. Anything that added to his credibility would help.

Grogan and Varney’s interviews were equally revealing. Only Bianchi’s version of how he lured Kristina Weckler outside her apartment did not seem to ring true. Kenny said that he had invited her to a party, but everything Grogan knew about Kristina and her opinion of Bianchi made it unlikely that she would ever have considered accepting such an invitation. It must have had something to do with a police ruse, Grogan figured, tricking her in some way. The bull about the party was Bianchi’s bizarre pride showing up. He would for the most part tell the truth, this time, as Grogan’s psychiatrist friend had predicted, but he would still fib here and there, for reasons of
pride and for devilment. He refused to admit stealing either Yolanda’s ring or Kimberly Martin’s necklace for the same reasons. To him being a thief was less glamorous than being a murderer.

When Grogan asked Kenny about the needle marks on Kristina’s inner arms, Kenny added a needle mark on Kristina’s neck. The left side, he said. Finnigan, who was listening in an adjoining room, looked at the coroner’s photographs of Kristina and found the mark. No one had noticed it before. Even more revelatory was Kenny’s description of the gassing. No one had known anything about the gassing before this moment. Grogan asked Kenny about what sort of gas pipe had been used, and Kenny described everything in convincing detail, down to the absence of a stove in Angelo’s kitchen, the location of the outlet, and how the gassing had been accomplished. When Kenny described how the flexible pipe had been placed alongside her neck and the plastic bag pulled over her head and tied off around the pipe, Finnigan again checked the photographs, and, sure enough, there was a vertical line on the flesh, a bruise from the pipe that, like the needle mark, had not been noticed before. All this was not merely new information, it was proof that Bianchi was telling the truth.

In talking about Lauren Wagner, Bianchi was similarly detailed about the attempted electrocution, and everything he said about the abduction squared with Beulah Stofer’s statements. He quoted Lauren as having said, “I love sex. It’s no problem. I’ll do whatever you want. I enjoy it so much that I just spent most of the day with my boyfriend. We’ve been doing it all afternoon.” Grogan said nothing, but he believed Bianchi. Grogan knew that Lauren Wagner had been in bed with her boyfriend just before the abduction, and there was no way that Bianchi could have known that then, nor could he have discovered it since. It was not something Grogan told the press or the family.

“Ken, there’s something that’s bothering me,” Grogan said after hours of talk. “Prior to your coming to California, Angelo Buono lived there alone. We didn’t have any strangulation murders
till after you came on the scene. Now, I talked to Mr. Buono and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to you and, I mean, I put my money on you in terms of intelligence and organization any day, rather than on Mr. Buono. What you tell us is kind of hard to believe, that Buono’s the organizer and you’re the follower.” Time and again Kenny had described how Angelo had led him, had figured out how to pick up the girls, how to kill them, and where to get rid of the bodies. “I don’t think you’re a follower, Ken. I think there’s some problem in that area. I don’t know if you’re being candid with us or you’re just trying to lay all the blame on Angelo Buono and you don’t want to accept any of it. You want to comment on that?”

“Yes. I think it’s best not to short-change Angelo Buono. There’s more there than meets the eye. This has been very obvious to me. I’ve had pretty close contact with him throughout this thing . . . He can come off as a real dumbo, just really off the train. And it’s not him. He’s not the most trained person around but he’s very, very, very street-wise and he’s also a little wise in other things, too. He can come off any way he wants to.”