Hillside Stranglers (32 page)

Neither the detectives nor anyone else had picked up on a revealing tidbit Bianchi had unknowingly dropped during the Lissa Kastin interview. He had said that Buono often called him by an Italian name during the killings. Bianchi had misprononuced
the phrase, not knowing how to spell it nor its meaning:

It’s Italian. It’s slang.
Minuni.
It means—I don’t know—I can’t really interpret it. It’s more a feeling. It’s a slang word in Italian and it has all different types of meanings. It means—it’s not something really nice. It’s not cussing somebody out, but it’s not real nice. Like Dumbo or something like that, you know, it’s just
minuni.
He used to call me
minuni
and he did that with Antoinette [Lombardo]. Called her
minuni.
She understood it better than I. You know, I’ve always had a feeling for what it meant, but she seemed to understand what it meant, and I never asked her about it.

No one followed up on the term; it seemed so trivial. The implications of
mi numi
remained hidden.

The mystery of the Buono-Bianchi relationship continued to haunt everyone, especially Grogan. Back in Los Angeles, he asked everyone who was willing to talk about it, and what he heard more than anything else was that the two cousins had appeared to hate one another and that Angelo especially was contemptuous of Kenny, throwing him out of the house and continuously bad-mouthing him as a lazy bullshitter. Finally Grogan went to see George White, Jenny Buono’s second husband, the old Indian who had seen the family from the inside, but not as a blood relation. George White tried to be loyal to his stepson and, like the others, said that Angelo had hated Kenny. But Grogan probed and probed:

“I know you don’t believe Angelo did anything, George, but just suppose for a minute, just suppose he did. Just suppose he and Kenny actually committed these murders together. How do you figure, supposing that, that these two guys who hated each other so much actually got to be asshole buddies, you know what I mean, that they ended up killing ten girls together? How would you explain that, George?”

George White said nothing, looking every inch the wise
old Indian who knew secrets of the earth but would not disclose them. Then he sighed and fixed Grogan with a stare and said:

“Well, Bob, you know those Guineas. They stick together like stink on shit.”

The small jet, leased from Continental Airlines, taxied up to the terminal at the Bellingham airport and Grogan sauntered out to meet it. When the pilot descended, he said that he was there to pick up the Grogan party.

“That’s us,” Grogan said and waved to the others to climb aboard. From out of the terminal came the other detectives, including Williams, who had flown up that morning, and Lieutenant Ed Henderson, who, as head of the Hillside Strangler Task Force, had felt that he too should be along for the ride. Bianchi, handcuffed, marched among them. As he said goodbye to his Bellingham lawyer, Dean Brett, Bianchi mentioned that he had been reading a wonderful book,
Blood and Money,
by Thomas Thompson. Bianchi hoped, he told Dean Brett, that someday someone would write such a book about himself. Maybe Thomas Thompson would be interested in the story.

“Who’s the prisoner?” the pilot asked Grogan, who, like a scoutmaster, was ushering everyone aboard.

“You don’t know?” Grogan said.

“No. I just got instructions to pick up Grogan and his party.”

“That’s the Hillside Strangler,” Grogan said. “We’re taking him back to L.A.”

“No shit. The Hillside Strangler! Hey, that’s great. How about I take her up to about thirty-five thousand feet and we open the hatch?”

There were just enough seats for everyone in the little jet. The detectives, plenty hungover, were in a festive mood. Lieutenant Henderson wanted to know how and why the hell Williams was on board, since he was supposed to be on assignment in Los Angeles, and Grogan said that it would have been a travesty of justice for Williams to have missed the occasion and that the other detectives had paid Williams’s way up to Washington. It was the first and maybe the last instance in the history of Los Angeles that the Sheriff’s Department had given money to the LAPD.

Grogan spent most of the flight taking photographs through the windows, talking the pilot into swooping low over Mount Rainier and other scenic wonders, so, as he said, he would have something to show his kids from the trip. After an hour or so Bianchi said that he had to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll take him,” Grogan volunteered. “Let me have the honor.”

He guided Bianchi back to the tiny lavatory at the rear of the plane, holding the door open to keep an eye on him, telling him that he sympathized with any guy who had to open his fly with handcuffs on, thinking silently about how Kenny and Angelo had let Kimberly Martin go to the bathroom before they had killed her, as Kenny had blithely narrated. As Bianchi urinated, Grogan could not resist taking a peek at what had caused so much trouble and grief. He called back to the other detectives:

“Hey, you guys! I got new evidence! Bianchi here can’t be
the one that did the sodomy! He ain’t got the
cazzo
for it!” (
Cazzo
being a strong Italian word for “penis” that Grogan had picked up as a kid on the Boston streets.)

There were no other gibes at the prisoner during the flight, but as Bianchi was making his way out of the plane, Dudley Varney whispered into his ear:

“You better tell the truth down here, Ken. If you don’t, I’ll personally escort you up to Walla Walla and give you a little present of a jar of Vaseline so you can enjoy getting what you gave to Dolly Cepeda and Sonja Johnson.”

On October 22 the posse finally captured the Buzzard, descending on Colorado Street accompanied by the press and television reporters and their lights and cameras. Angelo affected his usual jaunty cockiness, strutting about as though he were a celebrity, which he was. As Grogan put the handcuffs on him, he asked Angelo for his wallet.

“I never owned no wallet,” Angelo said. “Never owned a wallet in my life.” But with one hand still free he reached into his pocket and pulled out a big roll of bills, fifteen hundred dollars, which he said should be given to the owner of the glass shop next door, who would pass it on to Tai-Fun Fanny Leung Buono. The police honored his request.

Grogan had not expected Angelo to surrender his wallet. It had, Grogan assumed, now become methane gas in a rubbish dump, like the victims’ clothing. But at that moment Bill Williams was snooping around the little office in the Trim Shop. He opened Angelo’s desk drawer and there it was, a light tan leather wallet. Williams flipped it open and found no police badge but two pinholes on the leather and, on plastic windows holding photographs of young girls, the distinct outline of a shield-shaped badge. Williams rushed out to show. his find to the other detectives.

No one could imagine how the cautious Angelo, the guy who had not left a single other clue, could have been careless enough not to have disposed of the wallet long ago. At last they now had at least one piece of physical evidence, of Angelo’s police ruse if not of murder. It was not enough by itself, but it was something.

In the county jail, Angelo was put in a cell on B row in what was known as the Highpower or special security section, reserved for prisoners who were either a danger to others or themselves in danger, or both. Two kinds of prisoners were automatically placed in Highpower: snitches (informers) and babyrapers (rapists of underage girls or boys). Buono was in the latter category and if not carefully guarded and protected would have been attacked sooner or later by other prisoners. His fellow inmates on B row included a member of the Mexican Mafia who had a contract out on his life; prisoners who had assaulted deputies; a man whose father was a judge; an FBI informer; a parricide; a man whose father was a member of the state parole board; a member of the American Nazi Party; and, for several months, Peter Buono, in for grand theft, who was given a cell next to his father’s. The police had hoped that Angelo and Peter might say something incriminating to each other, but they hardly spoke, playing checkers with each other through the bars. Angelo did make the mistake of speaking at one point to another prisoner, however, Steven Barnes, a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang he had betrayed.

“How come you killed all those girls?” Steven Barnes asked Angelo.

“They were no good,” Angelo said, braggadocio overcoming smarts. “They deserved to die. It had to be done. But I only killed a couple of them. I ain’t worried. My cousin’s gonna go into his little nut bag.”

Barnes reported the conversation to the police. Such jail-house confessions were generally not powerful evidence, since the prisons teemed with men anxious to help themselves by snitching on others, but this one might help a little. The language, as reported by Barnes, was pure Angelo; several other witnesses, including Bianchi, said that “some girls deserve to die” was one of Angelo’s favorite phrases, and it was unlikely that Barnes, who knew nothing about the psychiatric interviews in Bellingham, could have made up the bit about the “little nut bag.”

Indeed, Bianchi had already gone into that bag. He had a
cell in a separate part of the jail with his own television set, and from there he began a series of long letters to Dr. Allison—"the epistolary Strangler,” Grogan dubbed Kenny—contradicting everything he had said to the detectives, pretending not to remember killing anyone, and reviving Steve, Billy, and the rest of his cast of characters. He said, of course, that he had been misunderstood and that he had implicated himself with Angelo only because the police “in their black and white minds felt I was putting too much blame on Angelo.” He had confessed only to save his life, to make the plea-bargaining deal. He wrote similarly to Angie Kinneberg. And when Deputy D.A. Kelly talked to him about these letters, he defended them, pretending renewed memory lapses, protesting his innocence.

Kenny’s motives in changing his story were simple. Roger Kelly had five Los Angeles murder counts dismissed. Had Kelly not dropped these charges, they could have been held over Bianchi’s head as a threat to make him stick to his plea-bargain agreement. Now he no longer had to fear the death penalty, since he had already been sentenced for the five other Los Angeles murders and the two in Bellingham. But as a snitch against Angelo he would be subject to the code among prisoners of death to informers. Therefore if he could make himself useless as a witness, he could avoid “having a K-9 jacket put on him,” prison lingo for being fingered as a snitch, K-9 being the classification for imprisoned informers. Kenny also hoped that by making inconsistent statements and by feigning memory lapses again, he might yet be declared insane, placed under psychiatric care, and released sooner or later. As usual, hope never left him and never did he give up scheming and scamming. In his mind his most serious problem remained the two Bellingham murders, for which there was such an abundance of evidence against him. He might wriggle out of Los Angeles, but how could he get his Washington conviction reversed? In time he devised a plan that he hoped would be just the thing to solve the Bellingham problem.

Early in June 1980, Kenny received a letter, sent to him in care of the county jail:

Ken,

You don’t know me but I would like to visit you. My name is Ver Lyn. I am a playwright and I am currently writing a fictional, lay entitled
The Mutilated Cutter.

The story is about a female mass murderer.

The letter went on to ask Kenny if he would be kind enough to read a draft of
The Mutilated Cutter
and to help her with the characterizations. The playwright had never met a mass murderer, she said, and wanted to make sure she got things right. The letter was signed “Veronica Lynn Compton, pen-name Ver Lyn.

Veronica Lynn Compton was indeed a playwright and a poet, of the sort bred by the idea of art as self-expression and of the artist as a tortured soul at odds with society—society being, so the concept evolved, at once healthier and sicker than the artist, who was to have it both ways. It was a concept at least two hundred years old, but in later years it had become especially popular in Russia and in California. Veronica was also an aspiring actress and had put together a portfolio of herself with the title
A Star Is Hiding,
consisting of glamour photographs in which she smiled, pouted, grimaced, and displayed herself in evening gown, bikini, leotard, and merry-widow-plus-garter-belt. The final photograph showed her sitting awestruck at the feet of the director of the Actors Studio and was inscribed, “For Veronica, With hopes & best wishes for the future, Lee Strasberg.” She had acted in various little theater groups around Los Angeles, and another of her plays,
Night Symphony,
had been performed at a theater in Hollywood and reviewed, negatively, in the
Times
and other publications. When not pursuing art, she was sleeping with various Hollywood types, including a lawyer-agent who later became the victim of an unsolved murder.

The Hillside Stranglings and all the publicity attendant on them had inspired
The Mutilated Cutter.
Her idea for the play was to add a feminist twist to multiple murder. The heroine—she planned to play the part herself—would strangle a female
victim and then traumatize the corpse’s vagina with a specially designed hollow dildo through which semen, previously collected for the purpose, would be squirted, thereby foiling and thwarting the male-dominated oppressive forces of society and the law.

Kenny at first made no response to the letter, but Veronica persisted. In every sense, she was a striking woman. Twenty-three, in appearance a dark, Latin spitfire, her burnished flesh emanating equatorial heat, she had been baptized Veronica Lynn Barrera de Campero. Her figure merited an
olé;
she was a beauty except for her nose, which was upturned to the point of snoutishness and lent to her face a porcine effect. She wrote Kenny several times again in quick succession: she had seen him on television, and never had she been so moved. (When sentenced in Bellingham, Kenny, alert to the cameras, had put on a lachrymose act of contrition, blubbering that his entire purpose in life was now to put Angelo Buono behind bars.) She was committed to art, Veronica wrote: “I adore art. I live for art.” Yet art was such a strain: “Whenever I complete a play, I get depressed.” She believed in freedom and extended her beliefs to her parakeet, which, she wrote proudly, she permitted to fly about the house, his droppings a small enough price to pay for the exhilaration she felt at his liberty.

She wrote that she identified with Kenny-and knew that fate had willed them to meet:

Things of nature are meant to be,

Such were two victims, a he, a she!

Musical magic it dispossess!

Rose-tinted fragrance is its dress!

Veronica, who was the daughter of the editorial cartoonist for a Los Angeles newspaper, had been briefly married and had borne a boy child, with whom she lived in a trailer park. Of her little boy, who was eight years old, she wrote:

He enjoys a good robust nude by Picasso but prefers the marble sculptures of grand breasts and proud ass. He is terribly erotic (and no I do not condone
incest
)
and loves to nestle and fondle my breasts . . . . He tries to court my female lovers. I am extremely discreet and he has only seen me in the act of love with his father (when he can sneak a peek!). I worship the little fellow with all the maternal zest of Mother Earth. At his school I turned down the P.T.A. presidency.

It took only a few such letters to convince Kenny that here was a woman worth meeting. He telephoned her—he had this privilege and his calls were not monitored—and agreed to see her in the visitors’ room at the jail in a few days’ time.

Now Veronica wrote Kenny that she was breathless with anticipation. She was counting the hours until their meeting. She could scarcely sleep. She knew that he was the man of her dreams who could calm her troubled soul:

Years of tears have made my life

Mistreated youth, unestimable strife.

She knew that somehow they would have a beautiful sex life together: she had had an orgasm when talking to him on the telephone. She would sweep him away to a place called Island Lost where “In and Out are non-existent as is the juxtapositional concept of Right or Wrong.” Oh, the exquisite painful pleasure of imagining what their meeting would be like: