Hillside Stranglers (33 page)

Bring in the champagne, more caviar,

I’m in love with Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Beautiful,

You’re the apple of my eye,

All day long I sigh.

My buttocks matched, so firm, robust,

Two dainty melons ripely just!

Her every dream was of him:

My dearest,

What a wonderful sex-filled night I had. It was so exciting. And the man was so mysterious. Took a long, hot bath at my house. And he looked so tempting as the steam rolled off his body. You will never guess who it is.

All night he stayed here with me. I can’t tell you how magnificent it was. It was simply outrageous.

You know him well. In fact, you know him very, very well. Do you want to guess? Forget it. You can’t in a thousand years. You know why? I will tell you. Because my lover was here in spirit, not in body. It was a dream, my precious, a dream about you.

Do you realize it’s only 51½ hours until we see each other?

Did I excite you with curiosity in the beginning of the letter?

And then, like a pedantic creative writing instructor, Veronica explained her literary devices:

Technique employed was suspense. Suspense adds to drama. Wait till you read
King Lear Revisited.
It is the play I am currently working on.

I hope you like it. I hope you can appreciate the enormous amount of work I had to invest in it.

She went on to suggest that Kenny memorize Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy so that he could recite it to her when they met.

At last the fateful meeting. Their romance exfoliated like a bruise. They talked for hours through the jailhouse glass, long visitors’ sessions being another of Kenny’s privileges. Veronica told Kenny that she herself was an actual murderess as well as
a playwright but that he alone now shared that secret. She was lying, but it helped to get their relationship off on an equal footing. Kenny told her that her letters were among the most beautiful things he had ever read and that
The Mutilated Cutter
reminded him of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
one of his favorite books. They discovered a mutual interest in necrophilia. Kenny envied openly her knowledge of literature. He wished, he said, to further his literary education, with Veronica as his guide. She suggested he start with Strindberg, Ibsen and Edward Albee. He was, he said, something of a poet himself. She entreated him to write love poems to her. She would visit him faithfully, play Juliet to his Romeo. They would write and telephone each other every day.

Kenny was not so caught up in the Shakespearean delirium of it all as he pretended. It was
The Mutilated Cutter
that had caught his fancy, not its author, and he began to formulate a plan to make use of Veronica with the plot of the play in mind.

But first he had to plight his troth. Poetry would be just the thing. He summoned his muse. He knew that for this literary lady he would have to rise above his usual plain style. Veronica required afflatus. He recalled from high school not Robert Frost this time but a romanticism of the sort favored by certain kinds of English teachers, and out of him poured these among many other verses:

[To Veronica]

Even as I walked towards you on that path,

in a field of marigolds, where a mist

gently caressed the earth, and

a warm breeze spoke softly of life

and love, I was almost home.

But nay, the
riata,
it held you out of reach.

You were but a sparrow’s feather away.

Riata,
a Spanish word for flood, stream, or freshet, he threw in as a bouquet to Veronica’s Latin blood. In the margin of this
poem he drew a Beardsleyish portrait of her as a long-nailed dragon lady. She responded:

Your virginal neck is so very beautiful, what grace and wondrous structure. With expert precision my knife’s razor edge skates across your jugular vein.

And then comes the deep rich redness. I drink fondly.

And he:

I keep thinking of the sunshine you bring to my life.

That first step:

Ah! the ecstacy of that

first step to sensuous bliss!

And the joining of two as one,

as the earth meets the sky,

as the oceans meet the shores;

inter nos
(between us)

we meet as one.

Your orbs are as deep as the oceans,

Your labiums hold the enthusiasm

of a thousand fires and ensure

precipitous impatience

of what you rejoinder next.

To you I toast the wines of Eros’

fountains and stand

despotically majestic.

Always he kept this elevated tone. Occasionally he chose peculiar metaphors. The following appears to have been drawn from dentistry:

The sheets do show

the impression still

of our finest moments.

The aseptic instrument of

peridental care stands perched

in lonely solitude

within the obscurity

of our powder room.

Apparently Kenny was comparing his penis to a toothbrush, perhaps one equipped with a rubber gum massager ("peridental"). It was after this that Veronica suggested diplomatically that Kenny equip himself with a dictionary and a thesaurus. “You,” he told her, “are a diamond in a pile of coal.”

However inept, his poems wormed their way into Veronica’s heart, and their conversations became increasingly intimate. He confided to her his pride in having killed so many women. He said that he believed in living for the moment and that his ideal would be to be at one with nature, free as a jungle beast. What was it like, she wanted to know, just to pick out girls at random and have sex with them and kill them?

“Well,” Kenny said, “it’s kind of like this, Veronica. It’s like a kid going down the street and you see all these candy stores and you can pick any candy that you want and you don’t have to pay for it and you just take it. You just do what you want. It’s the greatest.”

They discussed how delightful it would be to go on a killing spree together. Veronica suggested that they live together, kill dozens of people, keep the bodies in the basement, and then commit double suicide. “I know what we could do,” she said. “We could cut off their parts and have a collection of cunts, clits, and cocks! We could keep them in jars and take them out to look at them!”

This was a little beyond Kenny’s more wholesome approach to murder, but he went along with her. Soon she was saying that she was ready to die for him, and that was approximately what Kenny had in mind, although he warned her in avuncular fashion that she was “heading down a dangerous path.” Still, if she really loved him that much, there might be
something she could do for him. What he saw as the ingenious plot of her masterpiece,
The Mutilated Cutter,
might offer the key to his freedom. He could scarcely dare to suggest it, he said, but what if, just what if she were actually to carry out the plot of the play in real life, strangle somebody and make it look as though a man had done it? Not just any man, but the same man who had killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder in Bellingham. If she would go up to Bellingham and kill a girl and leave semen on her or in her, that would show that the police had arrested the wrong man.

Veronica agreed instantly. For her, she said, it would really be a form of research for her writing. She even ought to be able to write the trip to Washington off her income tax.

They made elaborate plans. They decided that if the plot worked and Kenny was absolved of the Bellingham murders, the next thing would be for her to provide him with alibis for each of the dates of the Hillside Stranglings. Let Angelo take the rap for them. Kenny gave her a list of the dates, with suggestions for alibis: they had gone to the movies, they had seen a play, and so on.

But first they would have to make sure that the new Bellingham strangling went off just right. Kenny had learned that his blood type failed to show up in his semen—Angelo also was among the 20 percent of males who were nonsecretors—and that meant that somehow he would have to supply Veronica with a sample of his own semen to leave with the body, so it would match that found on the Bellingham bodies. He would have to devise a way of smuggling semen out of jail. Meanwhile he advised her to pick as victim a girl with a car, so that she could leave the body in the car as he had Karen and Diane. She should be young, Kenny said, with “average tits,” and she should weigh no more than ninety or a hundred and ten pounds, so Veronica could handle her. Veronica should try the campus of Western Washington University: Karen and Diane had been students there.

On the morning of September 16, Veronica came to visit Kenny. The plan was for him somehow to give her a sample of
his semen and for her to fly up to Bellingham that afternoon. They talked together for about twenty minutes, and then Kenny handed her a book she had lent him, a hardbound collection of one-act plays, and he whispered, “When you’re alone, pull the string.” A piece of string, Veronica saw, dangled from the book’s spine.

Kenny had hidden his semen in the book. He had masturbated into the finger of a rubber glove that another inmate had given him, sealed the finger with bubble gum, and tied the piece of string around the finger. The string had come from his rosary, from which he had stripped the beads and crucifix. Alone in her car, Veronica pulled on the string and from out of the book’s binding emerged the semen-filled finger. What an ingenious lover she had! Now it was off to kill for him.

For her mission Veronica disguised herself with a blond wig and large sunglasses, and she stuffed a pillow into her dress, believing that a pregnant woman would look less threatening. From the Bellingham airport she took a taxi to the university and wandered around the campus for a while, searching out a victim. She had dosed herself with cocaine, for courage, but she failed to find, a promising co-ed, so she called another cab, bought a gallon of wine, and checked into a motel, the Shangri-la. She drank about half the wine, sniffed more cocaine, and decided to go to a bar for some real drinks.

At the Coconut Grove bar Veronica struck up a conversation with an attractive young woman and eventually invited her to try some cocaine at the Shangri-la. The woman declined but agreed to drive Veronica to the motel. This was going to have to be it, Veronica thought. Somehow she would have to get the woman into the motel and strangle her. Veronica bought several rounds of drinks to try to loosen the woman up. She tried to gain her sympathy by saying that the man who had got her pregnant had abandoded her.

In the car the woman pushed in a cassette. It was Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring.
Veronica knew the music and the ballet for which it was composed, an evocation of a primitive fertility ritual in which the lead dancer, portraying a sacrificial virgin,
dances herself to death. Stravinsky’s tempestuous rhythms encouraged Veronica. She would commit the act and from then on be able to write from experience. She would revise
The Mutilated Cutter
with a new confidence and act the principal role with a degree of faithfulness to the method style of acting that no one could match. She and Kenny would be able to live well. There would be a movie and she would be on the cover of
People
magazine. Even if she was caught and convicted, she thought, everyone would sympathize with a writer in search of material, an artist who had risked all for art. She might serve a little time, but the publicity would make her a star. A committee of artists would get her out of prison.

At the motel Veronica asked the woman to come in for a chat, pleading loneliness and melancholy, offering a glass of wine. The woman acquiesced, being a little drunk now and figuring that a glass or two might even her out.

Veronica went into the bathroom to fetch, she said, another glass. Behind the door she removed from her purse a length of stout cord and checked to see that the finger of semen was intact. She knew that as she came out of the bathroom, the woman would be seated with her back toward her and that this was the moment, it had to be now because the woman was bigger and probably stronger than she and surprise would be essential. She took a good grip on the cord, her fists spread apart on it, leaving a slack length between.

She reached the woman in two long strides, brought the cord down over her head and snapped it back against her throat, wrapping it once around, and started pulling.

The woman tried to draw air, tried to force a scream but only gargled, threw back her arms and grabbed at Veronica’s wrists, held, dug nails in, pulled with everything she had, wrenching from side to side, and with one great effort flipped Veronica up and over her. Veronica lost her grip, cartwheeled, smashed the small of her back going down against the arm of the chair, and collapsed moaning onto the floor. In a second the woman loosened the cord and threw it aside and was out of the door and into her car and away.

Veronica lay on the floor. She had failed. How would she
face Kenny? Would the woman go straight to the police? Quickly Veronica gathered up her clothes and hurried down the street and around the corner to a pay phone, where she called a taxi. She made it to the airport and away.

It took Veronica’s intended victim several days to recover from the shock. Her eyes had hemorrhaged and her throat was bruised; she was embarrassed by what she had allowed to happen, and bewildered by it at the same time. But finally she went to the police.

Again the rarity of violent crime in Bellingham made solving this case relatively easy, but Veronica helped by behaving peculiarly and creating a disturbance in the San Francisco airport, where she was meeting a connecting flight on her way home. She became hysterical, and police questioned her before allowing her to catch her flight. From that airport she mailed a letter and a tape to the Bellingham police, both accusing the authorities in the most obscene language possible of having arrested the wrong man (Bianchi) in the Bellingham murders and in the Strangler case, taunting them with the new strangling. All of these actions together with her being a well-known visitor to Bianchi in jail made her an instant suspect. When her airline reservations checked out and the San Francisco police verified a photograph of her, she was as good as convicted.