Hillside Stranglers (40 page)

Roger Boren and Michael Nash decided that the best way to handle her would be to reveal her character to the jury: there was no way to prove or disprove the supposed plot to frame Angelo. Nash cross-examined her. He was a small, wiry, intense man in his early thirties, with dark red hair and a full beard. He kept his emotions reined in, so that his cautiously phrased questions, coolly delivered, established a contrast between
himself and the wildly histrionic Veronica, who looked as though at any moment she might burst into song or leap from the stand to perform an impressionistic modern dance or another strangling. Nash with studied casualness asked Veronica about her plans to open a mortuary with the Sunset Slayer, Douglas Clark, so that the two of them could enjoy sex with the dead bodies. His tone was that of someone asking about plans to buy a country cottage.

“Of course you were just kidding around?”

“No,” Veronica replied warmly, “I think at that point that was something I was seriously considering.”

“[Clark] also sent you photographs of decapitated bodies which pertained to this case?”

“No, he sent me one photograph of a decapitated body, a small Polaroid shot, and a picture of a girl from the head up—I mean, from the waist up. And she appeared to have been just pulled out of one of the freezers in the coroner’s department.”

“Did he send you these for your own sexual fantasies or was that in relation to his case?”

“It was in relation to his case and probably because I was into that gory type of thing.”

Nash established that the original purpose of her relationship with Douglas Clark was to make Kenneth Bianchi jealous—although she insisted that Clark had come to mean something special to her—and he also got Veronica to admit that she was still angry with Bianchi. After all, she had tried to strangle someone for Kenny, was serving a life sentence for him, really, and what thanks had she gotten? His letters had become “so phony and just so—he was so careful that he didn’t incriminate himself about anything. And I used to get so furious because it would be like, you know, he was writing to a friend in high school that he went out with one or two times, not someone that [and here tears started in her eyes] everything he and I had been through together. [The tears abruptly dried up.] And I was angry with him.”

Her anger at Bianchi was enough to cast sufficient doubt on her story of a conspiracy to convict Angelo Buono, but Nash could not imagine that any juror would find her a credible witness
anyway. Veronica, after several days on the stand, retired again from the limelight, returning to her cell in Washington, where she said she was working on a series of biographies of great women.

The defense rested on August 2, but before a break to permit both sides to prepare final arguments, there was, over strong defense objections, one more jury-view.

The defense had introduced photographs depicting a view from the third floor of the Orange Grove apartments, the building that backed onto Angelo’s property. A resident living in an apartment on the third floor had testified that she, an elderly woman, had stared out of her back window
day and night,
could see everything that went on at Angelo’s, and was alert even to the slamming of a car door. She had never seen any bodies being carried out, she said, nor anything else of a suspicious nature. From the defense’s photographs, it did indeed appear that the apartment window offered a clear view of Angelo’s driveway, where, Bianchi had said, bodies had been placed in the trunks of cars. Although the defense’s investigator clearly stated before the jury that the photographs had been taken from a fire escape, not from inside the woman’s apartment, the prosecution feared that the jury was getting the impression that the pictures also represented what could be seen from inside, rather than from a different viewpoint on the fire escape. The photographs were part of a defense attempt to make the jury think that Bianchi had committed the murders somewhere other than at Angelo’s house. If the woman had not witnessed foul play, the jury was supposed to believe, how could there have been any?

But when members of the jury actually stared down through that apartment window onto Angelo’s old property, they found that they could see nothing of the driveway, only the awning until the driveway emptied out onto Colorado, as Roger Boren demonstrated by driving a car in and out. The witness would have had to have had X-ray vision to see through the awning.

The defense’s photographs, as the jury-view demonstrated, presented a far different vista from that possible to view from inside the apartment; and the woman had not stated that she had spent her evenings sitting out on the fire escape. Boren and Nash felt confident that this extra jury-view had succeeded in rendering the photographs irrelevant.

On August 23, as he prepared to adjourn the court for two weeks, the judge attended to a matter of procedure which, in view of the seriousness of the charges against Angelo, seemed superfluous. As part of a formal discussion with the attorneys on the subject of exactly what the judge should include in his instructions to the jury, the judge was required to ask defense counsel whether there were any charges against the defendant which were less serious than first-degree murder.

“It seems ludicrous to inquire,” Judge George said to Chaleff, “but I will ask you whether you have request for any lesser [charges to be] included.”

“You mean,” Chaleff replied, “like second-degree murder?”

The judge could not resist sarcasm:

“Manslaughter?” he suggested, and, in an allusion to the body sites, “Littering?”

“I am sure,” Chaleff began, the judge’s dark humor eluding him for the moment, “ah, reading the law under necessarily included, ah, littering? Littering is . . .”

At this point Roger Boren whispered to him that the judge was being facetious, and Chaleff said that, no, he was not suggesting that the defense wished to include any crimes less serious than premeditated murder.

“That seems appropriate,” the judge said.

Judge George took a holiday with his family on a ranch in Montana, but the case followed him there beyond the reach of telephones. In his absence Gerald Chaleff filed a petition with the Court of Appeal, objecting to an order by Judge George directing the defense to turn over to the prosecution some material relating to certain witnesses. On August 18 the Court of
Appeal ordered all further proceedings in the Hillside Stranglers trial suspended indefinitely, in order to determine the validity of a new statute authorizing such discovery.

Foreseeing a delay of weeks or even months in what had already become the longest criminal trial in the history of California, Roger Boren feared that the jury would at last disintegrate through weariness or illness or the simple necessities of going on with their lives. Boren quickly dropped the prosecution’s demand for discovery and contacted the judge in Montana, and, by shortwave radio, the judge vacated his order, clearing the way for the Court of Appeal to permit the trial to continue.

It was October 5, 1983, Angelo Buono’s forty-ninth birthday. The attorneys were in the midst of their closing arguments to the jury. Angelo had changed a great deal outwardly since his last birthday. His hair was now mostly gray, his skin the color of frog spawn. He had lost his swagger, did not walk humbly, to be sure, but bent, head down, anger bottled up. For the second year in a row Katherine Mader brought him a birthday cake and asked bailiff Jerry Cunningham to take it to him in his cell. Court was not in session at the moment, and the jurors were waiting in the jury room, but Roger Boren and Michael Nash were there, and Paul Tulleners.

This. time Jerry Cunningham refused to deliver the birthday cake. It had been his task to escort the prisoner to and from his cell every day. He had listened to every word of testimony—over thirteen million words by now—and had grown to
loathe Angelo Buono. I am not, he thought, going to take that son of a bitch another birthday cake.

“I won’t do it, Kathy,” Cunningham said. “Let’s call it security reasons. How do I know you haven’t put a file in there?”

Katherine Mader looked disappointed. She asked if anyone else would like a piece of cake. All refused.

“Gee,” Mader said, “it seems such a shame. Angelo will have to celebrate his birthday without a cake.”

“Look at it this way, Kathy,” Paul Tulleners said. “There are ten girls who’ll never celebrate a birthday again.”

In her closing defense of Angelo, Katherine Mader was passionately contemporary. “There is a core of goodness in Mr. Buono,” she told the jury, “a core of humanity.” He did not chase women: they came after him. He was never, like Kenneth Bianchi, rejected by women. What if he did pimp and mistreat Sabra and Becky? No one said he was perfect. He had many, many friends, male and female, again unlike Bianchi.

And as for Angelo’s “sexual preferences,” there was nothing particularly unusual about them. They were very human. She had read a book recently, Katherine Mader said, about the sexual preferences of famous people, and it turned out that Angelo was no different from some eminent historical personages. The author of
Alice in Wonderland
,
for instance, Lewis Carroll, had liked little girls. Warren Harding had carried on with a young girl while he was President. Ernest Hemingway had fallen in love with a young girl late in life. Charlie Chaplin liked young girls, too. And as for Angelo’s fondness for anal sex, Mader said, “In some countries, I think somebody told me it is Greece, anal sex is just the way that the people have sexual relations there.”

Continuing with her attempt to place Angelo into a relativistic sexual context, Mader proclaimed the fashionable conviction that “something is perverse only . . . if you want it to be perverse.” Bondage, for example, was big business in Los Angeles. This was an enlightened society. A lot of people in L.A. were fond of bondage. There were boutiques with whips and chains, corsets, shackles, handcuffs. “This,” she reassured the
jury, “is not something that is so out of the ordinary, so perverse.” Why, a magazine called “
Kinky Contacts
has a mailing list of fifteen thousand in the United States.”

As Gerald Chaleff would elaborate, she said, the Hillside Stranglings had been committed by one man, Kenneth Bianchi, a strong, powerful individual and a pathological liar, who had, as Veronica Compton had testified, tried to frame Mr. Buono. The prosecution’s tactic had been to try to “dirty up” Mr. Buono, who “hasn’t done wrong” and whom women had always loved. Because he was on trial for mass murder, he was presumed to be guilty. Mr. Buono was in the same unfair position as Erin Fleming, the woman who had cared for Groucho Marx during his last years. Erin Fleming was now trying to defend herself from false allegations that she had been cruel to Groucho and had taken Groucho’s money and—

Roger Boren broke in at this point to object that Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming had nothing to do with Angelo Buono. Judge George agreed, admonishing Mrs. Mader not to cite other pending cases during her closing argument.

Before finishing, Mader attacked Salerno and Grogan again, mocking the one as “honest Frank Salerno” and “honest Sergeant Salerno” and saying of Grogan: “Of all the detectives on the case, I really trust least the memory and the capacity for observation of Detective Grogan.” She brought up his Boston accent once more by way of ridiculing his identification of Buono’s accent as Brooklyn, and she reminded the jury that Grogan had wrongly stated that Buono had a space between his teeth. She added that both Salerno and Grogan had been unduly harsh with Mr. Buono when arresting him in 1979, saying to him, “Get out of that car. You’re under arrest,” as though Mr. Buono were presumed guilty. From the start, Mr. Buono had been a victim of police embarrassment over their inability to catch the Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi. The media had promulgated the idea of two killers after “this elderly woman,” Beulah Stofer, had said she had seen two men.

As she concluded, Mader started to say how “perceptive” she knew the jury members were and how well she knew they had been getting along with one another, but Boren quickly
objected, and the judge warned her that “the law clearly does prohibit anything that might be construed as currying favor or complimenting the jurors.”

It was after this that Bob Grogan got his chance to get back at Katherine Mader for ridiculing him in court. The two found themselves standing next to each other in the public elevator at the courthouse one afternoon. The elevator was crowded with a cross section of courthouse types—relatives of people on trial, witnesses, clerks, lawyers, the ethnic conglomeration that is downtown Los Angeles, so various in their costumes of T—shirts, starched Mexican frocks, electric-blue water-repellent leisure jackets, the odd bespectacled Ivy League legal hack in herringbone enduring woolly sweat to proclaim his distance from the multitude—and it would be a long ride down from the thirteenth floor, with many stops along the way. Grogan, dressed in his usual light-colored suit, white shirt, and tie, wanted to say something to Mader, but his tongue was thick with resentment. He stared up at the ceiling, composing vengeful phrases, but when Mader spoke to him he glared down at her. The uppermost wisps of her dark hair reached the level of his handkerchief pocket.

“Sergeant Grogan,” Mader began, “I hope you’re not mad at me for attacking you during the trial. You know I—I was just doing my professional job. Will you forgive me?” She smiled up at him.

Grogan took a deep breath. “Kathy,” he boomed out, startling the other passengers, drawing out the “a” in her name with all the Boston he could muster, “I wouldn’t forgive you on the day I die. You are an unethical cunt.” He let this sink in. “And the reason I’m calling you a cunt is because I know you like it.”

No one in the elevator spoke the rest of the way down.

Michael Nash’s closing arguments had preceded Mader’s—the order was Nash, Mader, Chaleff, Boren, with the prosecution allowed the last word because it had the burden of proof—and nothing she had said worried Nash, though all of it annoyed him. If the jury believed that kind of argument, Nash
thought, then the whole case had been a waste of time anyway. He found it difficult to summarize and outline her arguments, as he was trying to do to help Roger Boren prepare for his final argument, because she seemed to leap from point to point, back and forth and back again, with no discernible logical sequence. Nothing could have been in greater contrast to Nash’s own presentation, which in form had emulated the order of a mathematical proof but with emphasis, as he had promised Grogan, on the individual qualities of the ten murdered girls as they had been in life and as they were in death, beginning with a minutely detailed description of the bodies. He had hoped to rouse the jury from whatever moral slumber the two years of trial might have induced.

Nash had, with the aid of a chart, listed twelve separate categories of evidence that were damning to Angelo Buono: these were categories that corroborated Buono’s guilt quite apart from the testimony of Kenneth Bianchi. The twelve included:

1. Similarity of victims and their mode of death.
   

2. Geographical links to Buono—abduction and dump sites.
   

3. Use of police ruse and police paraphernalia.
   

4. Other incidents (Catherine Lorre, Jan Sims/Excalibur incident).
   

5. Evidence of two killers (bodies’ placement, Angeles Crest, Beulah Stofer).
   

6. Buono’s relationship with Bianchi.
   

7. Buono and sexual perversion.
   

8. Buono’s admitted use of customers’ cars (white Mustang).
   

9. Eyewitnesses: Stofer, Burke, Camden.
   

10. Prior contacts with two victims: Washington, Hudspeth.
    

11. Fiber evidence.
    

12. Consciousness of guilt (destroying badge, handcuffs; lying to Grogan and Finnigan on numerous points; denying owning wallet; lies to TV reporter; jailhouse confession).
    

In presenting all this evidence first, without referring at all to Bianchi’s accusations, Nash was following a deliberate strategy, his way of getting around the problem of Bianchi’s credibility. He was trying to get the jury to see that even without Bianchi’s statements, there was plenty enough evidence to convict Buono. Add to it Bianchi, and you had an overwhelming case, far more than the “slight” corroborating evidence needed by law to substantiate the testimony of an accomplice. Nash now listed fourteen revelations by Bianchi to the police in Bellingham which had turned out to be accurate and which corroborated many of the other points of evidence. He then concluded by breaking down the evidence on each murder count separately and, finally, by dismissing Veronica Compton’s testimony. She would have testified either way, he said, depending on who called her as a witness.

Gerald Chaleff’s argument consisted mainly of an extended attack on Bianchi’s credibility, the premise being that Kenny had acted alone and would not have implicated Angelo at all except by way of bargaining for his own life. For most of nine days Chaleff presented Bianchi as the master deceiver who had fooled everyone from girlfriends to doctors and lawyers. He tried to argue that to convict Angelo the jury would have to believe Bianchi “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but when Boren objected to this line of reasoning, the judge cautioned Chaleff: “beyond a reasonable doubt” applied to the case as a whole, not to Bianchi’s individual testimony, which was not subject to the same standard of credibility as was the actual issue of Buono’s guilt. The jury could choose which parts of Bianchi’s testimony to accept and which to reject. Chaleff
continued with his theme to the end, however, finishing with this admonition: “If you say to yourself, ‘I am going to convict Angelo Buono,’ then you also say to yourself, ‘Kenneth Bianchi has fooled me, too.’ ”

Roger Boren in his closing argument ridiculed the idea of Bianchi as such a successful liar, pointing out that people had seen through him all his life. He was the secondary character in the murders, really, acting as Angelo’s mouthpiece. Boren said that a good word to describe the accumulated evidence was “propinquity,” which could mean nearness in time or place and kinship or nearness of relationship. The evidence showed a propinquity between Bianchi and Buono and a propinquity among Angelo’s house, the murders, and the body sites.

In the midst of Boren’s argument, which took eleven days to deliver, the judge had to admonish Katherine Mader for distracting the jury by reacting visually and audibly to Boren’s statements. One male juror made it known after the trial that she had been staring at him throughout the prosecution’s final arguments—"eyeballing me” was his phrase—and that he had turned her away only by, he said, staring up her dress. At the bench Judge George told her:

“I don’t appreciate sighs. Will you please learn to conduct yourself professionally? I mean that, Mrs. Mader. I have had enough of that. So while we are talking about it, I have not brought it up but I was advised by the bailiff and started looking: you sat there shaking your head when you didn’t like things that Mr. Boren [was saying]. I do not appreciate sighs or laughter.”

Later during Boren’s argument, when Mader began clipping and filing her nails in front of the jury, the judge was inclined to admonish her again but let it pass.

Roger Boren spoke of the dead as though they had been his own daughters. As it happened he did have seven children—one fewer than Angelo—and he had come to take the case acutely to heart. A large, sandy, balding man, he was weary by the end, like everyone .else, but he had developed a sense of mission about getting a conviction against Angelo. A Mormon,
it was not at all difficult for Boren to believe that God was on his side in this instance. Although the jury knew nothing of Boren’s personal life or beliefs, he was probably the ideal kind of man to have the last word against Angelo. His argument was precise and exhaustive, but his manner carried equal weight. He never showed his anger, never raised his voice, but his tone conveyed an unobtrusive moral indignation that complemented his logic. In the end he compared the evidence to a large house made of sturdy old brick. You could chip away at the brick, he said, but through it all the house still stood. And Angelo’s house, though it had been demolished under suspicious circumstances, still stood at the center of the evidence: it had been the “epicenter” of that terrible earthquake of terror that had shaken the city six years before. He concluded:

The defense at the end of their argument said to you that you could be fooled by Kenneth Bianchi.

I will say to you that in the face of all this evidence . . . both in corroboration of Kenneth Bianchi and independent of Kenneth Bianchi—if in the face of reason Angelo Buono is not convicted of murder of these ten women, then you will have been fooled by Kenneth Bianchi.

You will have been fooled by him and you will also have been fooled by Angelo Buono over there and by his two attorneys.

The evidence supports his guilt and a finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Good luck and thank you.