Hillside Stranglers (34 page)

On October 3, Grogan and Salerno went to arrest her in her trailer in the city of Carson, an industrial suburb south of Los Angeles. Much to Grogan’s irritation, Deputy D.A. Roger Kelly also tagged along. They found Veronica living in disarray with a dope dealer. (Her son was safe in the custody of her father, who had taken the child from her in desperation over her way of life.) They had a warrant for her arrest, but at first Grogan and Salerno, having discussed strategy beforehand, simply asked her if they could talk to her about Kenneth Bianchi, whom they said they knew she had been visiting. She let them in without any fuss, and for half an hour Grogan sat with her on her couch, asking her about her ambitions for a movie career, praising her good looks, joking with her, flattering her intelligence, and so on, generally softening her up. He was just getting her to the point where she might tell them, he hoped, some
interesting things about Bianchi, perhaps in the (false) hope of extricating herself from a charge of attempted murder, which Grogan had been careful not even to mention as yet, when all of a sudden Roger Kelly, a small man who in voice and manner resembled the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, turned on Veronica and began yelling and screaming at her, accusing her of all the vile things of which she was of course guilty but uncharged. Kelly picked up some letters and drawings from Bianchi that were lying about and shook them at her, McCarthy-like, as he ranted.

Grogan wanted to slam a big fist into Kelly’s mouth right there, but he had to sit silently as Veronica, turned off entirely by Kelly’s accusations, clammed up. So much for that witness, Grogan thought. What was Kelly trying to do? There was nothing for it now but to arrest Veronica and have her extradited back up to Washington. Whatever use she might have had in the case against Buono—what might Kenny have told her about Angelo?—had been torpedoed. Had Kelly simply lost his temper, or what? Grogan wondered.

Afterward Kelly brushed aside Grogan’s objections by saying that Veronica was too crazy to be of any use as a witness anyway. But even crazy people, Grogan said, can give you information, can provide leads; they did not have to be put on the stand to be of help. Kelly would not listen.

Grogan began to brood. First Kelly drops the outstanding murder charges against Bianchi, so there is nothing hanging over him, and now this. What is going on here?

Bianchi lost interest in Veronica as soon as their plot failed and she was arrested. But her love for him, as she called it, endured, and she complained to him about his “chump” passionless letters, which became shorter and less and less frequent. When she threatened to tell everything she knew about him, he responded with a grandly entitled “Letter to the World”—Bianchi never slighted his own significance—proclaiming his innocence and the abuse he had suffered at the hands of a heartless society. “I haven’t killed anybody in my entire life,” he announced to the cruel world, but “the only
ones that care are myself, my beloved Veronica and perhaps my mom and Dad. You win, Angelo ‘Tony’ Buono.”

Veronica doubted his sincerity.

When news of her Bellingham exploit made the papers, she received a letter from another murderer, Douglas Clark, the Sunset Slayer, who was like Kenny being held in the Los Angeles County Jail and who commended her for her courage, saying that she and Bianchi were truly a modern Juliet and Romeo. Clark wished, he wrote, that he had a woman who would do as much for him.

Douglas Clark, who was later sentenced to death, was perhaps a more appropriate mate for Veronica than Kenny, in that Clark’s crimes and predilections ran to more extreme forms of sadism. Clark’s special talent was to force a woman to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint and, with nerveless confidence in his aim, to shoot her through the head as she brought him to orgasm. He would then chop off the victim’s head, place it in his refrigerator, and bring it out from time to time for further oral sex. All this Veronica knew when she wrote to Clark in February 1981, as she was awaiting being sentenced: “We are falling seriously, crazily, dangerously, omnipotently, ubiquitously in love with each other. Doug, that can only mean two things in my mind. One, we seriously got (Oh God, I can barely bring myself to write the God blessed word. I am embarrassed to even suggest it to you in fear I’ll look unchic, unsophisticated, unliberated and terribly corny. Shit, I’ll say it.) married. I’m in a tomb barely alive waiting in a casket for you. Love me.” She suggested that after they were released they open up a mortuary together: “Our humor is unusual. I wonder why others don’t see the necrophilic aspects of existence as we do. . . . Nature is nature. What lives that does not live from the death of someone else? . . . For me it would be a great honor to have you love my corpse, dissect it, explore, oooh! You could dissect your favorite parts and put them in jars of formaldehyde and keep my skeleton. Every night you and your house mouses could cuddle me.” As a Valentine, Clark sent her a photograph of a headless female corpse.

But it was Kenny whom Veronica truly loved, or so she told him. She wanted to make him jealous. She envisioned a headline in the
National Enquirer—
“
HILLSIDE STRANGLER DUMPED FOR SUNSET SLAYER”
—that would infuriate Kenny and cause his passion for her to return. Clark appealed to her and excited her—“I take out my straight razor and with one quick stroke I slit the veins in the crook of your arm. Your blood spurts out and spits atop my swelled breasts. Then later that night we cuddle in each other’s arms before the fireplace and dress each other’s wounds with kisses and loving caresses”—but Kenny occupied first place in her heart.

At her trial she argued that she had been doing research, and she wrote to her victim, woman to woman and mother to mother, asking her not to testify, saying that she should understand how a child needs its mother: hers was playing Little League baseball and his mother should be there to cheer him on. But in March 1981, she was sentenced to life in prison for premeditated attempted murder: the citizens of Washington were not pleased that someone had tried to import what they saw as a Hollywood style of life to their state. Her earliest possible parole would be in 1994. Months after her conviction, Kenny wrote to her curtly that he felt “shock and sorrow,” and Veronica flew at him, calling him an ingrate and worse. To Douglas Clark she suggested that he and she announce their engagement, saying of the faithless Kenny, “That weak-kneed fool. I have read into his silence and am inflamed!”

But neither prison nor disillusion in love stayed Veronica’s literary ambition. Taking heart from the Hollywood axiom that any publicity is good publicity, she wrote to New American Library, the publishing company, and to the William Morris Agency, saying that she was the world-famous Copycat Strangler (newspapers had so named her) and suggesting that a joint edition of her and Kenny’s poems, “with personal comments by both of us on our feelings and ideas of love,” would make a best-seller. Both William Morris and NAL declined participation. Later she extended her literary-homicidal contacts by writing to Jack Abbott, the literary killer. Norman Mailer, leading a coterie of literati, had helped to spring Jack Abbott from
prison, praising his prose style and promoting him as an artist victimized by a punitive penal system. Mailer had given Abbott brief employment as a researcher on
Ancient Evenings,
Mailer’s Egyptian novel; but Abbott then murdered a play-writing waiter and was returned to prison. Veronica was so enthusiastic about Abbott and his book,
In the Belly of the Beast,
the tirade Mailer had endorse, that she saluted Abbott as her “Dearest and most beloved Comrade”:

I am still drying my face from the shower of tears that o’erswept me as I read your book.

I suppose that I should let you know that your book is voraciously consumed by a prison full of women . . . . And for what it is worth Norman Mailer has nothing on you!

She then told Jack Abbott about her involvement with Kenneth Bianchi and her attempt to get Bianchi released by murdering on his behalf:

I was a woman who ventured to do something that had never been done. If anything, I am a brilliant, exciting and vivacious woman.

The world would never understand her or Jack Abbott, she said. But:

There will of course be a minority consisting of Norman Mailers and Veronica Comptons who will cheer, rant and rave, applaud and revel in your enlightenment. You are
our
guiding light, the beacon of liberation. Carry on my friend. I love you well.

But this was a merely literary romanticism, authentic life with Kenny fast becoming a receding dream. Her letters might achieve the eloquence of an Academy Awards presentation, but
her ratings were slipping. Parole was distant; what to do? Where could she audition? She sought for her name in the papers. She gained the admiration of other women prisoners by her Broadway vivacity. She tried lithium.

Bob Grogan sat in his apartment, his companions that night his jazz records and a book. From hour to hour as the music moved him he transferred his big body from the couch to the bench of his electric organ. For twenty minutes more or less he could forget the Stranglers by playing along with this band or that, forget too his missing family and his girlfriend, letting music and the occasional sip of whiskey banish his anger and his guilt. Then the record would end and in the silence the rotten emotions would return.

How it was that he had found himself living alone in this apartment he was not entirely sure, but often he thought that the case was robbing him of his sanity, more often he felt like a fool, and sometimes when he thought he was in love with K.O. he imagined a new life around the corner; but his longing for his family was too strong to permit that hope to flourish. He sensed that the case had caused him to let his family to go out
of focus, to dissolve into a background that was to be dealt with later; and then one day he noticed that he was out of his house and on his own again after twenty years of marriage, living in this apartment which, like most other new buildings in Southern California, had been designed for the young or rootless: impersonal furniture, a communal swimming pool, hanging lamps, colors derived from tropical fish, the whole thing suggesting a holiday from life.

Grogan was a poor liar and no good at keeping secrets, like those of a double life. Once K.O.’s existence was known, he had had to leave home, but the move at least for now was presumed temporary and he had not considered moving in with his girlfriend. Grogan did not really approve of what he preferred to call shack jobs anyway. Either you married someone or not, that was what marriage was for, and K.O. continued to live and to work fifty miles from him. But it was easier to see her than his children, who resented what he was doing and were barely speaking to him. He did not blame them, but he suffered under their scorn. His daughter had tried to understand but did not hide her hurt, and his son, Grogan felt, hated him. I have got to straighten out my life, Grogan said to himself several dozen times a day. Sitting in his second-floor apartment he felt up in the air in every sense, a floating object.

The apartment building happened to share a back fence with 809 East Garfield Avenue. Why had he chosen Glendale, why was he perched a mere hello from Kristina Weckler’s ghost and Kenneth Bianchi’s haunts? Why had he arranged it so that he could not drive to work without crossing Angelo’s Colorado Street only two blocks from the Trim Shop? Grogan cited the reasonable rent. It was not easy to find a decent apartment anywhere in Los Angeles for less than three hundred dollars a month, and he had the family to support, mortgage payments and the boat to keep up. But it was as though he had taken roost there believing or compelled to hope that if he hovered daily near the scenes of evil, somehow the spilt blood would have to be avenged.

It was March 1981, and Grogan had just learned of Veronica Compton’s conviction, but he took little pleasure in it. What
he had found out about Veronica, her correspondence with Bianchi, her extensive sexual involvements with prominent Hollywood types who had enough money and enough lawyers to keep their behavior out of the papers, made Grogan less pleased at her conviction than depressed at what she represented. She might be crazier and more reckless and more desperate from drugs than most, but she was far from unique, only a visible example of a city that often seemed to be at war with everything that mattered in life. A city? Maybe an entire country, Grogan was beginning to think.
Vogue
magazine, as Veronica had pointed out to him during their too brief conversation in her trailer, had been featuring sadomasochism as a fashion motif. New music celebrated torture, self-mutilation, and death. Ugly was in. Maybe, Grogan thought, turning up the volume on the phonograph, I have ended up in an anachronistic profession. Maybe being a homicide detective is just whistling Dixie. Maybe I am just standing in the way of what everybody has decided is the really fashionable thing to do, kill one another. Maybe I have become like the guy still printing books by hand or the priest still saying mass in Latin. If that was true maybe he was meant to be alone.

He knew that he was alone in certain speculations about the case, especially about Bianchi’s background and the question of how he had evolved from a difficult child into a killer. The psychiatrists, Grogan believed, had been off on a wild goose chase when they had tried to establish that Bianchi’s adoptive mother had been cruel or even violent to him: Grogan was sure that Bianchi had made up all that stuff on the spot. Grogan believed just the opposite, that Bianchi’s mother had been overprotective of her only, adopted child. Something a psychologist in Rochester had written in a report on Bianchi back in 1962 stuck in Grogan’s mind:

It would appear from Kenneth’s viewpoint that his mother has related to him in such a way so that he feels his very survival depends on his being in her good graces. In order to do so, he must maintain very rigid control over his
masculine aggressive impulses. The need not to show any masculine assertiveness is so great that his basic identification is quite diffuse and contains as much of a feminine component as a masculine one. There is a tremendous amount of anxiety generated in all of this, so much so that one wonders how well Kenneth could maintain his psychological integrity if he did not somatocize it [experience frequent psychosomatic illness] in the way he does now.

The psychologist, Dr. Robert Dowling, had concluded his report:

It is thought that Kenneth would respond well to individual psychotherapy, but without simultaneous treatment of his mother, who it appears is not accepting of such a plan, the effects of such a course of action would be fleeting.

Dr. Dowling, Grogan believed, had been on to something, especially in suggesting that the mother needed treatment as well.

As for the case against Buono, the preliminary hearing in municipal court had been dragging on since the previous May. Dozens of witnesses were testifying to the kind of life Angelo and Kenny had led together. As it turned out, much of this material would not be admissible before a jury. Important new evidence had finally developed, however, thanks to the persistence of Kathy Vukovitch, a criminalist with the LAPD, who had established that the fiber found on Judy Miller’s eyelid had almost certainly come from the Trim Shop. Chemists from the DuPont and the Monsanto corporations had found no significant differences between the Judy Miller fiber and the foam that Angelo used in upholstering, the foam Bianchi had mentioned as blindfold material. Vukovitch was working on the Lauren Wagner fibers as well.

This was a promising development, the only good piece of physical evidence so far, but there had been discouragements too. One day the previous November, Angelo’s house had disappeared:
bulldozed, apparently on the orders of the owner of the glass shop next door, to whom Angelo had signed over the deed. Sheriff’s Department artists had constructed a precise scale model of the house, based on photographs and measurements taken earlier, but it would have been far more effective to be able to take a jury through the actual house, whenever a jury was at last chosen. Now 703 East Colorado Street was only a paved empty lot, the Trim Shop still at the rear but not a trace of the actual murder scene remaining. The owner of the glass shop denied any collusion with Angelo in the bulldozing, insisting that he had been losing money on the property, unable to rent it with the house still there.

But more disturbing, in Grogan’s mind, was the behavior of the prosecutor, Roger Kelly. Having begun by doubting Kelly’s will to carry through such a difficult case, Grogan now suspected Kelly of deliberately trying to scuttle it. The worst moment for Grogan and, he feared, for the case, came when at last, after what he estimated as at least a hundred visits (four hundred cookies, two hundred cups of coffee) to Beulah Stofer, Grogan had finally persuaded the woman to give a statement to Kelly. This visit happened by chance when Grogan, Varney, Williams, and Kelly were driving Bianchi around Los Angeles in a van, determining his ability to pick out abduction and dump sites. On Lemona Street Grogan suggested that they leave Bianchi guarded in the van and stop in to see Beulah.

More coffee and cookies all around. Mrs. Stofer recounted her story again, saying as usual that she had seen everything through the front window, Grogan as sure as ever that she had gone outside to quiet Caesar and to take a closer look. Shrubbery in the yard now obscured the street from the window, but she assured Kelly that she had been able to see clearly through it three and a half years before.

Kelly listened, and then, to Grogan’s horror, he laughed at Mrs. Stofer. “You expect me to believe that?” he said. “You expect a jury to believe that? It’s ridiculous!”

Grogan, asking Kelly to leave, tried to calm Mrs. Stofer down, assuring her that he believed her and that he would convince Kelly, who was just a little irascible today.

Outside, Grogan tore into Kelly, calling him a son of a bitch and asking him what the hell he was trying to do. Was he trying to ruin a witness? Grogan, looming over the little prosecutor, clenched his fists.

“You guys are crazy,” Kelly shouted. “That woman has no idea what she saw. Well, we’ll have to throw that count out!”

Grogan lunged at Kelly, screaming as the other officers leaped to hold him back. From then on he found it difficult to speak to Kelly at all, and he vowed never to speak to him again once the case was over.

When Kelly did the same thing to Jan Sims, scoffing at her story about the attempted abduction in the Excalibur, Grogan knew that the case was in deep trouble. Kelly shouted at Mrs. Sims: “Don’t you know your testimony could send an innocent man to the gas chamber?” Innocent? Grogan was speechless. Kelly told the police to stop trying to find the Excalibur—the vehicle registration records had turned up nothing, nor had a search of garages in Buono’s neighborhood—because there was no Excalibur. Mrs. Sims was just fantasizing, Kelly said: her identification of Buono and Bianchi from photographs meant nothing.

The most charitable interpretation of Kelly’s behavior was that he did not believe in eyewitnesses, but that was a rather unlikely position for a prosecutor to take, and Grogan did not believe it. Of all the eyewitnesses, only Catherine Lorre and Markust Camden now looked as though they might be useful, and Camden was hardly an impressive character, although criminal cases often had to rely on witnesses whose own lives were poor models of civic propriety. Catherine Lorre had confirmed Bianchi’s story of her near-abduction and had reenacted the scene for Salerno and Finnigan, who took photographs with themselves acting Angelo’s and Kenny’s roles. Even better, on her own she had identified Angelo. In December 1979, she had been visiting a biker friend of hers at the county jail when she spotted Angelo, who was receiving a visitor of his own at the time, a faithful girlfriend. Catherine Lorre had immediately telephoned Kelly, saying that she was certain that this was one
of the two men who had stopped her in Hollywood two years before.

Sergeant Bill Williams’s persistence had turned up another witness who added something to Bianchi’s credibility, a woman who acknowledged that two naked girls had disturbed her and her husband’s sleep late one night in September 1977. The girls had asked for clothing, saying that they had been stripped and forced out of a car by two men. The woman’s husband had since died and she had moved, but Williams had traced her through a neighborhood association of householders, who had remembered hearing her talk of the incident.

All this Grogan pondered that night in his apartment. The thought that Kelly might throw out the Lauren Wagner count seemed inconceivable, but that was what Kelly had said he was going to do. For the other count for which Grogan had primary investigative responsibility, Kristina Weckler, there was little on Angelo, only that he had purchased a flexible gas pipe from Antoinette Lombardo’s parents’ store before the murder. And Bianchi was continuing to change his stories from day to day, claiming renewed memory lapses, denying this and admitting to that, then reversing himself, making it clear that only a prosecutor determined to separate Kenny’s lies from his truths with corroborating evidence would stand a chance of convicting Angelo. Grogan would have attempted to get Kelly removed from the case, but there was no chance of that now. He and the other detectives had tried that over a year earlier, even before Bianchi had been arrested, when in another case Kelly had publicly criticized the LAPD. They had said then that they found Kelly impossible to work with, and for a few days another prosecutor had been assigned to the Hillside Stranglers case. But, so Grogan believed, the District Attorney’s Office then decided that the LAPD could not be permitted to choose prosecutors, and Kelly had been reinstated.

Grogan’s mood was no better the next morning. He dreaded seeing Kelly in court and trying to be helpful to him: all the detectives were in court almost every day, either testifying or making suggestions to the prosecution, shepherding
witnesses, listening for new clues or at least hints. That morning before going to court Grogan calmed himself, as he sometimes liked to do, by scanning what the LAPD called its Murder Books, a collection of files going back to the earliest days of the city, records of all the known homicides that had been committed in Los Angeles since the turn of the century. As the century had lengthened, the files had become more complex, and it pleased Grogan to look over some of the earliest cases from time to time. The directness and simplicity of the old entries amused him and soothed his nerves. That morning he read, flipping the pages in the big old book, the passages crudely typewritten with odd lines scribbled in some long-dead homicide detective’s hand:

April 21, 1899

PALOMI JOHNSON, stabbed to death some time last night in rooms of M. CASTELLA, New High St.; suspect CASTELLA. Both drunk. CASTELLA captured.