Hillside Stranglers (5 page)

“Where do you want me to take it from?”

“Just stand there by the bed. Hurry up. I can’t stay in here all night.”

Bianchi took the picture and tore off the film. Buono got off the girl and told her to put her legs down. “Just relax, honey,” he said. He took the camera and film from Bianchi. “Your turn.”

“I want to see how it came out,” Bianchi said.

They waited a minute in the dim light. Buono peeled back the photograph. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Okay, your turn. I’ll get her things together.”

Bianchi took off his clothes and climbed onto the girl. After a few strokes he breathed at her, “Did he fuck you in the ass? Did he? Did he? Well, turn over, bitch. Turn over. Get ready for it.”

When Bianchi emerged from the spare bedroom, Angelo had arranged her clothes in a neat pile on the dining-room
table. The two dollars and change was gone, and the purse sat atop the pile.

“We better gag her again,” Angelo said, handing Bianchi the roll of tape. “You know where the rag is.” Bianchi found the rag on the bed, told the girl to open her mouth, stuffed the rag back in, and sealed her mouth with a few strips of tape. He returned to Angelo and watched him put the clothes and purse into a large green garbage bag. Angelo ripped up the photograph and the negative and dropped them into the bag.

“Well,” Angelo said, “how’re we gonna do this?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. How’re we gonna strangle her? We got to strangle her. It’s the only way to do this, unless you got some other ideas.”

“Me? No, sounds fine to me.”

They had already agreed on strangulation. Angelo had been eloquent on the subject. He always liked talking about the best way to do someone in. Shooting was too dangerous, he said; gunshot wounds told too much of a story, they were messy, and bullets could be traced. Other methods—bludgeoning her to death, chopping her up, poisoning—introduced too many complications. They had never worked out the details, but strangulation was definitely the way to go. Besides, the thought of watching a girl gasping for breath was appealing in itself, they agreed.

“I got some stuff out in my shop would be good to use. It’s strong. We’ll decide how we’ll do it. Be right back. Watch her. Just stand by and watch her.”

Bianchi kept an eye on the girl through the doorway. She did not move. She was breathing heavily. Angelo appeared lugging a large wooden spool wound with white nylon cord. Ordinarily he used it for edging seat covers. “Probably the best way to do this,” he said, “is take off lengths of it.” He unreeled some of the cord and measured it efficiently around his elbow and fist, two, three, four arm lengths. He got the scissors from the kitchen drawer, cut the cord, and tied a large knot into each end.

“When I put this around her neck—I’ll do it,” Angelo volunteered. “You watch how I do it. When I put this around her neck, she’s going to kick and she’s going to fuss and she’s really going to squirm. So probably the best way is, you kneel on her legs. Or you can sit on her legs. Just sit on her legs, you know, facing her. Like you was going to kiss her. No, wait.” He snipped off another length of cord. “First, tie up her ankles with this. That will cut down on her moving around and she won’t kick you in the nuts.”

“Got it.”

“Okay. Let’s go. I’ll give you the sign when to sit on her.”

“Jesus,” Bianchi said. “My hands are sweating.”

“Wipe ’em on your ass, motherfucker.”

In the spare bedroom, the girl lay still, but she had begun to shake.

“Wait a minute,” Angelo said. He handed Bianchi the cord. “Hold this a minute. Be right back.”

He brought in her slacks and underpants. “We’ll put these on her,” he whispered into Bianchi’s ear, “ ’cause when she kicks off, she’s going to pee or crap and I don’t want her to mess my rug.”

Angelo approached the bed. “Here now, honey. Sit up now, honey.” He pulled her up and pushed her legs over the side of the bed. “We’re going to put your clothes on now. That’s right.” He eased on her underpants and slacks. He zipped up the slacks. “Now, just stand up. Come on, stand up, that’s it. Now, just sit down.” He motioned to Bianchi that he was going to put her on the floor. Bianchi prepared to catch her. “Just sit down, don’t worry, you’re not going to fall. I got you.” Angelo lowered her to the floor. “Now, just lay there a minute. I’ll be right back.” And he whispered to Bianchi: “I thought of something else. This’ll be perfect, and it’ll save time.”

Bianchi bound her ankles as tightly as he could. Her shaking had become violent. Angelo came back holding a plastic vegetable bag, the kind dispensed free at supermarkets. “We’ll put this on her head,” he whispered. He seemed delighted with his ingenuity. “That way, she can’t get any air, it’s cutting off her air, she can’t get any new air. When I put the bag on her
head, that’s when you sit on her legs.” He took the long cord from Bianchi and slung it around his neck. Angelo was ready. He Hexed his fingers and stood there looking as efficient as a professional hangman.

The girl lay on her back on the floor. Angelo knelt behind her head. He looked up at Bianchi, nodded vigorously at him, and Bianchi lowered himself quickly onto the girl’s legs, facing her, sitting on her knees. She groaned behind her gag, tried to roll to the side, tried to rise up at the waist. Angelo pressed his knees down onto her shoulders. He opened the plastic bag with both hands, jammed it over her head, pulled the cord from around his neck, and wrapped it quickly once around her neck, sealing the bag. She wriggled. Bianchi raised his legs, letting his full weight press down through his butt on her knees. Buono started to pull on the two ends of the cord, then shifted around and put one of the ends under his right foot, catching the knot against the side of the sole of his shoe, putting all his weight on that foot. Then he pulled on the other end of the cord with both hands and rose up, pulling, yanking. She was trying to buck and flex now. Her bagged, roped head hit Buono’s foot, and he lost his balance, falling over backward, shouting, “Fuck it! Hold her!” He regained his position, one foot on one end of the cord, both hands on the other end. He yanked with all his strength, pulling upward and backward, letting out grunts of effort which mingled with the gargling of the girl, who arched her back, jerking for her life. The vegetable bag puffed frantically in and out with her breathing, then less frantically, then barely, and then it stopped puffing, she stopped Hexing, she stopped breathing, it was over.

“Hard work,” Buono said, letting the cord fall loose, rubbing his face on his shirtsleeve. He stood and caught his breath and lit up a Kool.

“Can I bum one?” Bianchi asked. “I’m out of smokes.”

Angelo knelt down and put his ear to her left breast. “She’s croaked,” he said. “Can’t be too sure, though. Sometimes when things like this happen, people start breathing again. Really hard to tell. Let’s put everything away. Then if she’s still not
breathing, she’s definitely croaked. When you take off her pants, make sure you don’t get nothing on the carpet.”

In the stillness after death, Buono busied himself. He brought in the green garbage bag with her purse, shoes, socks, bra, and blouse in it. He unhandcuffed her and replaced the cuffs in the cigar box. Bianchi removed the vegetable bag from her head and the tape and foam from her eyes, the tape and rag from her mouth. A little blood trickled from her lips.

“Only women bleed,” Angelo said. It was a favorite phrase of his. He had picked it up from a current Alice Cooper song. With greater originality he added, “Girls like that deserve to die.” He said that one often, too.

The cord, the tape, everything went into the green garbage bag, which Angelo took outside to the dumpster in his drive-way. He tossed the bag into the dumpster and moved other trash on top of it. It would be picked up tomorrow and taken to a vast dump of a landfill with millions of tons of what no one wanted. Gradually it would become methane gas.

“What do we do with the body?” Bianchi asked.

“We’ll find a place. I got something in mind. First off, we got to get it into the car. Here’s what we do. We take it as far as the washing machine there. Put it down by the back door. I go out, see if the coast is clear, I get your trunk open. We put it in the trunk and we get the hell out of here.”

Bianchi took her under the knees, Buono under the arms. They carried her through the kitchen. Her dangling arms flopped about, hit the floor hard. One hand clonked against the washing machine.

“Put her down here,” Buono said. “Give me your keys.” He went out the side door, opened the trunk of the Cadillac, came back in. “Coast is clear. Now, fast. Fast as we can.”

Hefting her again, they shuffled hurriedly through the door, over to the car, her skin glowing dully in the night. The trunk was plenty big enough for her.

“Come on back inside,” Buono said. “Make sure we didn’t leave nothing.”

They checked all the rooms.

“Let’s go,” Buono said. “I’ll drive.”

He headed the Cadillac northward through the night. Glendale Avenue to Verdugo Road, La Cañada Boulevard, and up La Crescenta Avenue, straight up into the hills.

“Where are we?” Bianchi asked.

“You’ll see. I know where I’m headed.”

Far up into the hills, Buono turned left onto Alta Terrace Drive. He cut the headlights and rolled slowly along the street.

“How did you know this place?”

In the darkness Buono pointed to a two-story white house halfway down the street. “That’s where that cunt Melinda Hooper lives. I picked her up there a couple times. Had dinner there. Wait till she wakes up tomorrow. She’ll get some surprise.” He slowed to a stop on the left side of the street in front of 2844. “Real quiet now. And quick. Get that trunk open.” Bianchi reached into the glove compartment and pushed a button that released the trunk lid. “Open your door real quiet. And don’t close it, get me? All right. We’ll get her and dump her over there.”

“People could see her.”

“You got it. Maybe Hooper will find her. Like to see that.”

Quietly and quickly they picked up the girl, Buono carrying her under the arms, Bianchi under the knees. Buono stepped first over the curb, and as Bianchi followed, his foot caught under the ice plant. He stumbled, almost fell, got his foot loose, and they dropped the body parallel to the curb, heaving her slightly, as you would throwing someone into a swimming pool.

“Don’t close your door yet,” Buono whispered, getting behind the wheel. He had left the motor running. He turned around in the street, headed back the same way, made a right down La Crescenta, switching his headlights back on and telling Bianchi it was all right to close his door. They were safely away, speeding toward the city lights.

“Shall we do something?” Bianchi asked as they crossed Foothill.

“I’m heading home.”

The Italian flag hung spotlit above Buono’s house. When Angelo stopped in the driveway, Bianchi started to get out.

“Let’s call it a night,” Angelo said. “I’m beat.”

“Okay.” Bianchi held out his hand across the Cadillac. “We did it, Buzzard. We really did it this time. Wait till they find her. It’ll make the papers. It’ll be on every channel. Listen, I’ll talk to you. I’ll be in touch.”

Angelo took his hand and looked into his eyes.

“Mi numi!”
Angelo said.

The words, emitted more than articulated, were a benediction. Bianchi did not understand them, although it was not the first time that Angelo had addressed him so. Bianchi took the phrase as some Italian form of affection and endearment. A bastard, he did not have the syllables in his blood. He thought that Angelo was saying “my friend,” or “my companion,” or “my beloved cousin,” or maybe something silly, like “Dumbo,” or maybe nothing more than “Here’s looking at you, kid.” It was all of that, but it was more. Had Bianchi understood it, it would have made no impact on his contemporary sensibility. It was a term that had migrated all the way from Sicily, and it came to Angelo’s lips with no more deliberate consciousness than the howling of a dog at the moon, a phrase typical of southern Italians, whose speech and customs still reflect the survival of ancient ways, even in the new world, even in Glendale.

Literally it meant “my gods.” More deeply, it invoked a pre-Christian pagan world ruled by the religion of the Numa: a time when the gods determined every man’s and woman’s fate or destiny, when the presence of divine will and inspiration was palpable in every human act; a time when a spark from the hearth was a living sign of the divine presence—Romulus had been born from such a spark, Deity was in this place—
Numen Inest!
And it was a time when the gods demanded that most perfect of all sacrifices, a young, newly ripe human life.

“Mi numi!”
was how one tragic lover would address another, a spontaneous, pagan religious ejaculation evoking the fateful bonds of blood and death. The lover addressed would
symbolize the destiny of the other. The use of
mi
rather than the grammatically orthodox
miei
indicated the southern Italian dialect. When Angelo spoke these words to Bianchi, they conveyed: “You are my fate, my destiny. You and I are bound together. Forever. In blood and in death.”

“Mi numi!”
Angelo said, calling it a night.

Neither the press nor television paid much attention to Buono and Bianchi’s Halloween prank, and on radio there was not a word of it. Murder was so common in Los Angeles: there was one committed every three or four hours in the county, not counting the whores routinely overdosed by their pimps. It took something special to titillate the media, an eviscerated actress or a child stuffed down a sewer. But the girl remained unidentified for two days, and so, at the request of Sergeant Salerno, the
Times
ran this bulletin on the fourth page of the Metro section:

PUBLIC’S AID SOUGHT

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide detectives were seeking public assistance Tuesday in trying to identify a young woman whose nude body was found in the
bushes in front of a La Crescenta residence. Investigators said the victim, described as between 16 and 22, five feet two inches tall, weighing 90 pounds, with reddish brown hair, appeared to have been sexually molested before she was strangled.

Her body was found Monday in front of a home at 2844 Alta Terrace Drive, La Crescenta.

The article was illustrated with two vivid drawings of the girl’s face as it might have looked in life, one in profile. The
Herald-Examiner
also ran the story, and local television news programs gave it a few seconds.

When her parents or relatives or friends still failed to appear to identify her, Frank Salerno started haunting Hollywood Boulevard every night until three or four in the morning. Salerno was acting on an educated hunch. Since no one had come forth to identify the girl, the chances were that she had been living for some time as a runaway. Either her parents did not know that she was missing, or they did not care, or she had no parents, all equal possibilities. Although her body had been found miles from Hollywood, runaways in Southern California gravitated toward the Boulevard. Some of the street people might recognize her from the drawings, might have noticed her missing, might even have seen her on the night of the murder.

It was not much, but Salerno had nothing else. The coroner had concluded only that she had been vaginally and anally raped and that she had been strangled to death by ligature within two hours of midnight, before or after. The time frame had been established by the temperature of her liver, which had cooled off quickly in the brisk air. It had been forty-five degrees or lower that night in the hills.

Not knowing the murder scene, Salerno was at a great disadvantage. Ordinarily he would take an investigation outward from there, but Alta Terrace had not been the murder scene. None of the residents aroused the least suspicion, nor had any of them heard anything unusual during the night. Charles Koehn’s peculiar work schedule checked out. One man, a truck
driver, had gone to a party with his wife but had returned home before midnight, noticing nothing. The others had been home all night and asleep early. Tests on the fiber Salerno had taken from the girl’s eyelid had been inconclusive, except that it had not come from the Koehns’ toys or from their poodle.

And so Salerno began walking Hollywood Boulevard through the nights, questioning its floating citizens, showing them the drawings and asking whether they knew this girl. These were the dropouts: addicts and pushers, bikers, whores, socially and sexually displaced persons, entrepreneurs of the transitory, a new American class. They had the morals of the Forty-niners but were not prospecting for gold. Most of them had given over their lives to the next fix. They often knew one another, or were aware of one another, by sight and by name, and they knew, vaguely, when somebody overdosed or simply disappeared, wasted. Their hearts entwined by sadomasochism, they outwardly resembled refugees from the Haight-Ashbury culture of the sixties, favoring leather and denim and lots of hair, an acid-rock Paleolithic look, except for the whores, many of whom looked like whores, and the male prostitutes, who were typecast for an Andy Warhol movie. They had street names like Stinkyfoot, Sunshine Sally, Eggnog, Youngblood, Cowboy Dave, Pigvalve, Flakey, Skateboard, Lobo, Green Irene, Funny Bunny; and since they were all either selling or taking drugs, or both, Salerno could not trust their answers to his questions. But night after night, he kept asking. Through them all Miss Miller, an old lady carrying a tote bag and wearing a lampshade hat decorated with paper leaves, who had consecrated her life to sitting in the front row of Merv Griffin’s television studio audience every night, threaded her way.

The street people depressed Frank Salerno. They sometimes made him indignant. You could not be a homicide detective and have a weak stomach, but these nights tested him. He was a conservative man. He liked evenings at home with his wife and two teenage sons in their San Fernando Valley house. His pleasures were fishing trips or reading in silence or, after mass, Sunday dinner with the relatives, cooked by his grandmothers, both of whom had been born in Italy. Moving among
the street people made him feel contaminated. It was like bathing in raw sewage.

Salerno could not have been mistaken for one of the street people. He might have been a college professor who had gotten off at the wrong stop. He wore a soft tweed jacket, a muted tie, and light wool slacks. His shoes were thin-soled and expensive. He kept his straight, graying hair neatly trimmed and combed. His wire-rimmed aviator-style glasses accentuated an air of mannerly inquisitiveness. Meeting him, you would not have guessed that he carried a little .38 pistol in the small of his back.

Salerno kept his weight down and had the fluid moves of a centerfielder: if he resembled an Italian physical type, it was DiMaggio. He moved among the street people like an anthropologist, questioning, hypothesizing, inwardly calculating, outwardly impassive. “Excuse me,” he would say to a knot of bikers, appearing to grant them, for the moment, membership in civilization, showing his badge, “do you recognize this girl?” “Sure,” one would say, “I know the chick. She was here last week.” Or: “She’s from Denver. Name of Debby. Maybe Donna.” When he got what he could out of them, he would thank them and go on. He was almost courtly. They were his antithesis, but he disguised his moral indignation. That he saved for quiet talks with his wife and sons or more animated talks over many drinks with friends. Then he would use words like “scumbag” and “evil.”

Salerno made notes of everything the street people told him, but he filtered everything through his experience with liars. It was only when several of the boulevardiers gave the girl in the drawing the same name, Judy Miller, that he knew he was getting closer. The name came out among coffee drinkers at the Howard Johnson’s on Vine and again at the Fish and Chips shop, a favorite hangout of the damned that stood between the old Hollywood Theater (then showing
Deep Throat)
and a tattoo parlor.

At the Fish and Chips, two people volunteered the name Judy Miller. One was a whore approaching retirement age; the other described himself as an unemployed disc jockey and
bounty hunter. They both claimed to know her, and both described her as a teenage runaway, a green kid who sometimes turned a trick for a bed or a hot dog. The bounty hunter, a meaty, nervous guy wearing a leather vest, said that he had seen this Judy Miller leave the Fish and Chips on Sunday evening no later than nine or ten. Salerno noted that the timing was about right. But the mature whore claimed that she had seen Judy Miller getting into a car with a light-skinned Negro as late as two or three on Monday morning, near the International Hot Dog stand. Remembering the coroner’s calculations, Salerno figured the whore was lying or hallucinating or simply mistaken, but her description of the girl did jibe with the bounty hunter’s. Salerno took their names and addresses. He would interview Markust Camden and Pam Pelletier again. If a witness knew something, you never got it all on the first interview. Sometimes you didn’t get it until the tenth. He gave them his card and asked them to phone him if they remembered anything else or heard anything.

And then everything changed.

On Sunday morning, November 6, a woman jogging near the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale came upon the nude body of another strangled girl, crumpled up beside a road that ran past the golf course. The case was being handled by the Glendale police, but when Salerno talked to them, he immediately saw connections with the girl he was beginning to believe was called Judy Miller. Like the first girl, this one had been found nude and, the Glendale police said, had been strangled by ligature. Checking a map, Salerno calculated the distance between the sites of the two bodies as six or seven miles. In Los Angeles, that was close.

More links established themselves the next day, when the girl’s mother identified her as Lissa Kastin, a twenty-one-year-old waitress at the Healthfaire Restaurant near Hollywood and Vine, who had been living in an apartment on Argyle, just off Hollywood Boulevard. Her parents were divorced, and the night previous to her disappearance she had spent with her mother, complaining of how little money she was making and
saying that she was considering becoming a prostitute. But she was a hardworking, ambitious girl, her mother said, and very health-conscious. She did not like red meat and had her heart set on show business. She had performed with the L.A. Knockers, an all-girl rock dance group.

It was the association with Hollywood, not the girl’s dreams or dietary preferences, that struck Salerno. Lissa Kastin had last been seen leaving the Healthfaire at about nine-fifteen the night she had been murdered. If she had told her mother about considering becoming a prostitute, she might already have been one. It was possible that both girls had been picked up in Hollywood by the same trick or tricks, and had then been killed and dumped in the same general area, a twenty- or thirty-minute drive from the pickup spots. Her car, a Volkswagen convertible, was found unlocked half a block from her apartment. In her apartment, Glendale officers found a key to the car’s locking hood but not the ignition key, and the apartment had been locked. Salerno reasoned that she had been either walking the street or walking from her car to her apartment when she had been picked up. But it was odd for a girl living in Hollywood not to have locked her car.

Salerno decided to have a look at Lissa Kastin’s body. He wanted to compare it with that of the first girl. He called the coroner’s office and asked to have the two bodies displayed side by side at the morgue. The first had been kept on ice for nine days.

One glance at the two bodies, lying next to each other on gurneys, face up, made Salerno think: Xerox copy. Their necks, wrists, and ankles were encircled with nearly identical lines of bruises. “Five point ligature,” Salerno wrote in his notebook. Physically they were very different—about the same height, but the new girl was heavier, stocky, with large breasts and thick, unshaven legs. It was the bruised lines that made Salerno think of a Xerox copy. And Lissa Kastin, like the first girl, had been raped, although with Lissa there was no evidence of sodomy. Her vagina was severely bruised. There was now no question in Salerno’s mind that the girls had been killed by the same men.

And he was more certain than ever that there had been two men. Neither body showed any signs of having been dragged. They seemed certain to have been lifted cleanly from a car and placed or dropped where they were found. Of course, more than two men could have been involved, but that seemed less likely to Salerno. He conferred with the Glendale police, and they agreed with him. He also examined the place near the golf course where Lissa Kastin had been found and noticed a three-foot guard rail between the road and the body site: surely it had taken two men to get the body over that rail cleanly. Salerno then drove at a steady thirty-five miles an hour directly to 2844 Alta Terrace. The distance between the two body sites was 6.8 miles, and the drive had taken him a mere fifteen minutes. The two murders were now inextricably linked to him.

But if there were two, there would likely be another. How much should he or the Glendale officers tell the media? Salerno felt that he had made some progress, but all he had really established, to his own satisfaction, was that two murders had been committed by the same two men, with the crime beginning in Hollywood and ending in the foothills of La Crescenta and Glendale, neighboring communities. The more the killers knew about how those deductions had been made, the more likely they would be to change their modus operandi and throw the investigation off track. Their m.o. was the only solid lead Salerno had. And so it was decided, among the agencies now involved, to reveal a little but not very much. “TWO GLENDALE SLAYINGS MAY BE LINKED,” read the
Times’
headline on a small story buried in Part I, page twenty-seven on November 10. There were no details except that the two girls “were strangled in the same fashion”: nothing about the five-point ligature marks nor about any of the evidence suggesting two killers. Salerno would have preferred that not even that much be disclosed, but you always had to tell the reporters something. Otherwise they would try harder to find out more on their own. Lissa Kastin was identified, but Judy Miller remained anonymous—and unburied. It was not until the evening of November 10 that Salerno finally ran down her family, such as it was.

More tips from the street people had led him late that
Thursday afternoon to the Hollywood Vine Motel, an establishment of no pretentions that offered bargain weekly rates. There in a room sour with old food and old diapers he came upon what was left of the Miller family: Judy’s mother and father and her two little brothers, the younger of whom resided in a cardboard box shoved into a corner. Mr. Miller was an unemployed security guard. He nodded and identified his daughter from the drawings Salerno showed him.

“Do you know where your daughter is?” Salerno asked.

Neither the father nor the mother knew. Salerno did not bother asking the older boy, who was absorbed in a cartoon on the television.

“Was she a runaway? Did she run away from home?” Salerno could not think of another word than “home,” though there was none. Obviously Judy had run away from nothing.