The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (41 page)

Again, an experiment provided the answer.
Orne dropped a hint that most ‘multiples’ have at least three personalities.
The next time he was under hypnosis, Bianchi immediately produced another personality, a frightened child named Billy.
It now seemed virtually certain that Bianchi was malingering.

It was the police who proved it beyond all doubt.
Allison had asked ‘Steve’ if he had a last name, and Steve had mumbled ‘Walker’.
Salerno had seen the name Steve Walker in Bianchi’s papers.
It proved to be the name of a graduate in psychology from California State University.
One of Bianchi’s dreams had been to become a psychiatrist, but he had possessed no qualifications.
He had overcome this with a little confidence trickery.
He had placed an advertisement in a Los Angeles newspaper offering a job to a graduate in psychology.
Thomas Steven Walker had answered the advertisement, and sent Bianchi some of his academic papers.
He never saw them again.
Bianchi used Walker’s name – and papers – to obtain a diploma from California State University, requesting that the name should not be filled in because he wanted to have it specially engraved.
When he received it, Bianchi simply filled in his own name, and set himself up as a psychological counsellor.

The fact that there was a real Steve Walker, and that Bianchi knew of his existence, finally left no doubt whatever that Bianchi was malingering.
At a sanity hearing in October 1979, Orne’s opinion carried the day; Bianchi was judged sane and able to stand trial.
Now he realised that he might go to the electric chair for the Hillside Stranglings in Los Angeles, Bianchi hastened to plead guilty to the two Bellingham murders, and to engage in plea-bargaining: to plead guilty to the Bellingham murders and to five of the Hillside Stranglings for a life sentence with a possibility of eventual parole, in exchange for testifying against his cousin Angelo Buono.
The plea of guilty made the expense of a full-scale trial unnecessary, and on 21 October Kenneth Bianchi was sentenced to life imprisonment.
He sobbed convincingly, and professed deep remorse.

He was flown to Los Angeles, where his cousin had been arrested, but the case was still far from over.
Incredibly, the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office decided that since the chief witness against Buono was his cousin, and that Bianchi was clearly unreliable – if not insane – it might be best to save the cost of a trial by dropping all murder charges against Buono.
This extraordinary decision was fortunately overturned by Judge Ronald M.
George, who decreed that Buono should stand trial anyway.

Even in prison, Bianchi made strenuous efforts to persuade various women to supply him with alibis, and one of them actually agreed to claim that he was with her on the night of one of the murders; at the last minute, conscience prevailed and she changed her mind.

There was still another strange development to come.
In June 1980, Bianchi received a letter from a woman signing herself Veronica Lynn Compton, who asked him if he would be willing to co-operate on a play about a female mass murderer who injects semen into the sex organs of her victims to deceive the police into thinking the killer was a male.
When Veronica Compton came to see him in prison, Bianchi became distinctly interested.
She proved to be a glamorous brunette who was obviously slightly unbalanced.
She was fascinated by murder, and together they fantasised about how pleasant it would be to go on a violent crime spree, cut off the private parts of their victims, and preserve them in embalming fluid.
Soon afterwards, they were exchanging love letters.
Bianchi now suggested that he should prove her love by putting into operation the scheme she had devised for her play: that she should murder a woman in Bellingham and inject her with sperm through a syringe, so that it would appear that the strangler was still at large.
The infatuated Veronica agreed.
Bianchi provided the sperm by masturbating into the finger of a rubber glove, and smuggling it to her in the spine of a book.
Veronica flew to Bellingham and registered at a motel called the Shangri-la.
In a nearby bar she got into conversation with a young woman called Kim Breed, and after several drinks, asked her if she would drive her back to her motel.
At the Shangri-la, Kim Breed agreed to come in for a final quick drink.
In the motel room, Veronica vanished into the toilet, then came out armed with a length of cord; she tiptoed up behind the unsuspecting girl and threw the cord round her neck.
Kim Breed was something of an athlete; she managed to throw her attacker over her head.
As Veronica Compton lay, winded, on the carpet, Miss Breed fled.
When she returned to the motel with a male friend, her attacker had checked out and was on her way back to Los Angeles.

It proved easy to trace her through her airline reservation.
Veronica Compton was arrested, and in due course, the ‘copycat slayer’, as the newspapers labelled her, received life imprisonment for attempted murder.

The trial of Angelo Buono, which began in November 1981 and ended in November 1983, was the longest murder trial in American history.
When it came to Bianchi’s turn to testify, it was obvious that he had no intention of standing by his plea-bargaining agreement; he was vague and contradictory.
When Judge George pointed out that he could be returned to Washington’s Walla Walla – a notoriously tough jail – he became marginally more co-operative.
Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the murders were described in appalling detail.
Buono was finally found guilty of seven of them.
Since his cousin had already escaped with life imprisonment, the jury recommended that he should not be sentenced to death.
Buono received a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Bianchi was returned to Walla Walla to serve out his sentence.
In 1989, he married a ‘pen pal’, Shirlee J.
Book, whom he met for the first time the day before the wedding.

Through the detailed evidence given by Bianchi, it slowly became clear what had turned the cousins into serial sex killers.
Angelo Buono, born in New York in October 1935, had been in trouble with the police from the age of fourteen, and spent time in reformatories.
He married for the first time at the age of twenty, but his brutality – and his penchant for sodomy – led to divorce; three more unsuccessful marriages followed.
In 1975, Buono set up his own car-body repair shop in Glendale, and became known as an excellent upholsterer – one of his customers was Frank Sinatra.
In spite of a certain brutal coarseness, he was always attractive to women, and liked to seduce under-age girls.
His cousin Kenneth Bianchi joined him in Los Angeles in 1976.

Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born in May 1951, the child of a Rochester (N.Y.) prostitute who gave him up at birth; he was adopted at the age of three months.
(Zoologists have pointed out that the most important ‘imprinting’ occurs in the first weeks of a baby’s life; if a child receives no affection during this time, it remains permanently incapable of any deep relationship, and may become a psychopath.) He proved to be a bright, intelligent child, but a compulsive and pointless liar.
Unlike his highly dominant cousin Angelo, Bianchi was a weak-willed person whose chief craving was to be regarded as a ‘somebody’, and he would lie and deceive indefinitely to this end.
When rejected by girlfriends, he had a tendency to turn violent.
He was also a habitual thief.
Unable to hold down a regular job, and turned down by the police force as obviously unsuitable, he decided to move to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-four.

He moved in with his cousin Angelo, and was deeply impressed by the way the older man bedded teenagers and induced them to perform oral sex.
He applied to join the Los Angeles and the Glendale police, but both turned him down.
It was then that he decided to set up as a psychiatrist, and placed the advertisement that brought a reply from graduate Steven Walker.

After a few months, Buono became bored with his weak-willed cousin and asked him to move out.
Bianchi found a room in an apartment block and obtained a job with a real-estate company, which he soon lost when marijuana was found in his desk drawer.
Armed with his forged graduation certificate, he rented an office and set up as a psychiatrist, but patients failed to materialise.
It was then that Buono made the suggestion that they should become pimps.
Bianchi met a sixteen-year-old girl named Sabra Hannan at a party, and offered her a job as a photographic model.
When she moved into Bianchi’s house, she was raped, beaten, and forced into prostitution.
So was a fifteen-year-old runaway named Becky Spears, who was subjected to sodomy so frequently that she had to wear a tampon in her rectum.
These were only a few of Buono’s ‘stable’ of women.

Problems arose in August 1976 when a Los Angeles lawyer rang and asked for a girl to be sent over.
Becky Spears looked so obviously miserable that he asked her how she became a prostitute; when she told him her story he was so horrified that he bought her a plane ticket and put her on the next plane home to Phoenix.
Buono was enraged when Becky failed to return and made threatening phone calls.
The lawyer countered by sending an enormous Hell’s Angel to see him, backed by a number of equally muscular friends.
When Buono – who was working inside a car – ignored his callers, the Hell’s Angel reached in through the window, lifted Buono out by his shirtfront, and asked: ‘Do I have your attention, Mr Buono?’ After that the lawyer received no more threatening phone calls.

This episode was almost certainly crucial in turning Buono into a serial killer.
An intensely ‘macho’ male, he was undoubtedly outraged by the humiliation; in the curiously illogical manner of criminals, he looked around for someone on whom he could lay the blame, and his anger turned against women in general and prostitutes in particular.
Soon after, his pride received another affront.
From an experienced professional prostitute, Bianchi and Buono had purchased a list of clients who liked to have girls sent to their houses.
When he tried to use it, Buono discovered that he had been swindled: it was a list of men who wanted to visit a prostitute on her own premises.
The woman who had sold him the list was nowhere to be found.
She had been accompanied by a black prostitute named Yolanda Washington, who worked on Hollywood Boulevard.
On 16 October 1977 Bianchi and Buono picked up Yolanda Washington, and both raped her before Bianchi strangled her in the back of the car.
She was the first victim of the Hillside Stranglers.

The experience of killing a woman satisfied some sadistic compulsion in both of them.
On 31 October 1977 they picked up a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Judy Miller and took her back to Buono’s house at 703 East Colorado.
There she was undressed, and taken into the bedroom by Buono.
After he had finished with her, Bianchi sodomised her.
Then they strangled her, suffocating her at the same time with a plastic supermarket bag.
The murder was totally unnecessary since the girl would have been glad to accept a few dollars.

The next victim was an out-of-work dancer named Lissa Kastin.
They stopped her and identified themselves as policemen – a method they used in most cases – then took her back to Buono’s house.
There she was handcuffed and her clothes cut off with scissors.
Both men were repelled by her hairy legs; so Bianchi raped her with a root beer bottle, then strangled her, while Buono sat on her legs shouting ‘Die, cunt, die!’ (Buono invariably referred to women as ‘cunts’.) Bianchi enjoyed strangling her, and allowed her to lose consciousness and revive several times before killing her.

A few days later, Bianchi fell into conversation with an attractive Scientology student, Jane King, at a bus stop.
When Buono drove up and offered him a lift home, the girl also accepted.
Back in Buono’s home they were delighted to find that her pubis was shaven.
Because she struggled when being raped, they decided that she needed a lesson.
A plastic bag was placed over her head while Bianchi sodomised her, and she was allowed to suffocate to death as he came to a climax.

The shaven pubis gave them the idea that it would be exciting to rape a child.
On 13 November they approached two schoolgirls, fourteen-year-old Dollie Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, twelve, and identified themselves as policemen.
The girls had just been shoplifting, and made no objection when asked to accompany the ‘policemen’.
In Buono’s house, both were raped, then Sonja was murdered in the bedroom.
When Buono came back for Dollie, she asked: ‘Where’s Sonja?’, and Buono told her: ‘You’ll be seeing her soon.’

When Bianchi had been living in the apartment building in Hollywood, he had been enraged when an art student next door spurned his advances.
So Bianchi and Buono called on twenty-year-old Kristina Weckler and Bianchi told her he was now a policeman, and that someone had crashed into her Volkswagen outside.
She accompanied them down to see, and was hustled into their car and taken back to Buono’s house, where Bianchi obtained his revenge for the earlier snub.
They decided to try to kill her by a new method – injecting her with cleaning fluid – but when this failed, they piped coal gas into a plastic bag over her head, strangling her at the same time.

On 28 November 1977 they saw an attractive red-headed girl climbing into her car, and decided to follow her.
Lauren Wagner was having an affair with a married man, and had just spent the afternoon in his bed.
The two ‘policemen’ told her they were arresting her as she pulled up in front of her parents’ home, and she was dragged, struggling, into their car.
A dog barked, and a neighbour saw what was happening, but failed to grasp its implications.
At Buono’s house, Lauren Wagner pretended to enjoy being raped, hoping that they would allow her to live.
They tried to kill her by attaching live electric wires to her palms, but these only caused burns; they were finally forced to strangle her.
The next day, Buono obtained the telephone number of the house where the dog had barked by ringing a friend on the exchange, then made the threatening phone call.

In December, the prostitute Kimberley Martin was summoned by telephone to the Tamarind Apartments, where Bianchi lived, then taken back to Buono’s where she was raped and murdered.
Both men agreed she was no good in bed.