World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (15 page)

During this time, Buono had established himself as an auto-upholsterer with his own business. Strangely, despite his unattractive physical appearance and his terrible record of abusive behaviour, women seemed magnetically drawn to him. He sported dyed hair and flashy jewellery; in essence he looked like a pimp – and this was just the career sideline he was planning on moving into when, in 1975, his cousin Kenny showed up from back east.

Kenny and Angelo hit it off from the start. Kenny already had a simmering resentment of women; Angelo showed him how to express it. He started by teaching his cousin how to impersonate a policeman in order to blackmail prostitutes for sex. Kenny was an eager student and happy to go along with Angelo’s pimping plan. The pair met a couple of runaways, Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears, and put them out on the streets until first Becky and then Sabra succeeded in running away.

Meanwhile, Kenny was once again working as a security guard and had found a new girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, who had recently become pregnant. Kenny was disturbed by the loss of the pimping income that had enabled him to impress Boyd with his wealth. Together with Angelo, he decided to recruit some new girls. They found a prostitute named Deborah Noble who offered to help them out. However, when she tried to trick money out of them, they decided to teach her a lesson.

First Killing

Unable to find Noble they instead came upon her friend, a prostitute named Yolanda Washington, and decided to take their anger out on her. Whatever their initial intention, they ended up raping her, strangling her with a garotte and dumping her dead body in a cemetary. Evidently this first crime sent Bianchi and Buono over the edge. Their next victims were two more prostitutes, Judy Miller and Lissa Kastin, murdered over the next two weeks. Kastin’s body was found on 6 November, but there was little public outcry: Los Angeles had too many murders for the deaths of three hookers to merit much attention.

All that changed later that month, during the week of Thanksgiving, when five more bodies were found on the Los Angeles hillside. None of these were prostitutes: these were middle-class girls, one of them only twelve years old. All had been abducted, raped and asphyxiated with the trademark garotte; in several cases there were signs of torture. Now Los Angeles was in a state of red alert too.

It was ten days until the deadly duo struck again. Their next victim was another prostitute. Kimberly Martin had gone to meet a client on 9 December; her dead body turned up on the hillside the next morning. Their next victim, Cindy Hudspeth, was found on 16 February; her raped and strangled body was found in the boot of her car, which had been pushed over a cliff.

The police continued their investigations but seemed to get nowhere. Los Angeles held its breath, but nothing happened. The months passed and the Hillside Strangler seemed to have retired. Perhaps it was simply down to fear on Bianchi and Buono’s part; perhaps it was connected to the fact that Bianchi’s girlfriend had given birth to their baby early in 1978, and he was caught up in domestic matters. Whatever the reason, the pair stopped killing – but only for a while.

Emerging Evidence

Later that year, Bianchi moved with his new family to Bellingham, Washington, and found work as a security guard. A year passed and then the murderous urge caught hold of him again.

He lured two young women, Diane Wilder and Karen Mantic, to a house he was guarding, and then raped and murdered them both with considerable brutality. This time, however, Bianchi soon emerged as a suspect and was arrested. Once under arrest, further evidence started to emerge to connect him to the Hillside murders.

It was two years before the case finally came to trial, during which period Bianchi persuaded a serial killer groupie called Veronica Compton to carry out a murder for him, intending to suggest that the Strangler was still at large. The plot failed dismally and Compton herself was imprisoned.

Finally, the case went to court. Both Bianchi and Buono were found guilty of the Hillside stranglings. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Buono died in prison from unknown causes in 2002. Bianchi continues to serve out his sentence.

Kenneth Bianchi – in custody at last.

Angelo Buono, who died in prison in 2002.

Hit and Run

Detectives usually have difficulty persuading the guilty to confess to their crimes, but in the case of the murder of 17-year-old Rosemary Anderson they had two conflicting confessions from two different suspects to choose from! How could they be sure they had charged the guilty man? It took 40 years and the use of a new forensic science to uncover the truth behind a serious miscarriage of justice and reveal the true identity of a hit-and-run killer.

On the evening of 9 February 1963, John Button invited his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, to his parents’ house in Perth, South Australia, to celebrate his 19th birthday. During the evening they quarrelled and Rosemary stormed out, determined to walk home alone. John followed her in his car, a French Simca, talking to her as she walked along the dark, otherwise deserted roadside. But she was in a foul temper and refused his offer of a lift home, so he stopped and watched dejectedly as she disappeared round the next corner. Anxious not to leave her in this mood he decided to catch up with her, but when he did so he made a shocking discovery. Rosemary was lying face down at the side of the road, bruised and bleeding, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. In desperation John carried her limp body into his car and rushed to the hospital, but there was little the doctors could do. Rosemary died shortly after being admitted and John was charged with manslaughter.

The case hinged on the fact that there was damage to the front of the Simca and droplets of blood on the front bumper. John protested his innocence, but to no avail and after several hours of intense interrogation, during which he later claimed he had been beaten by the police, he confessed. Within hours he recanted, saying that he had only admitted guilt in an effort to end the interrogation and stave off another beating. In his defence John claimed that the damage to the car had been incurred weeks earlier and that the blood on the bumper resulted when he brushed past it when carrying Rosemary to the car. But the confession and the forensic evidence was sufficient to convict him. John was condemned to serve ten years’ hard labour in Australia’s notorious Fremantle Prison.

Seven months later, John thought his luck had turned when a prisoner informed him that a new inmate was boasting that he had intentionally killed a young girl for the fun of it in John’s neighbourhood on the night in question. The driver was Eric Edgar Cooke, a psychopath who had been sentenced to death for a series of brutal murders. The police took Cooke to identify where he had run Rosemary down, but he pointed out the wrong place and so John’s appeal was turned down. Cooke again confessed to Rosemary’s murder on the day of his execution, but it was not sufficient to free John Button. Button was released after five years in 1968 for good behaviour.

Freedom Is Not Enough

Free, but unable to live with the stigma of being labelled a convicted killer, John determined to clear his name. He found an unlikely ally in Estelle Blackburn, a female journalist who had been dating his brother. She was able to access files that had been closed to John and to interview people who would not talk to him about the case.

Estelle discovered that Cooke had confessed to six hit-and-run murders, but that this information had not been introduced at John’s appeal. Convinced that John was innocent, Estelle enlisted the help of W. R. ‘Rusty’ Haight, an expert in the new forensic science of Pedestrian Crash Reconstruction, which Rusty liked to describe as ‘common sense mixed with basic physics’.

Using a properly weighted and articulated bio-medical dummy suspended from a fishing line, which broke on impact, and a lightweight French Simca identical to John’s car, Haight proved that the damage to the car was inconsistent with the injuries sustained by the victim.

Rosemary had been hit at 48km/h (30mph), which leaves distinctive markings on the vehicle as the body folds around the front of the car with the head impacting on the bonnet to leave a noticeable dent. John’s car did not have this damage when the police impounded it. Furthermore, Haight managed to obtain a 1963 Holden which was the car Cooke had driven when he claimed to have killed the six women. When the dummy was hit by the Holden it landed on its back in the position John claimed to have found Rosemary in, whereas when the Simca hit it the dummy landed on its face.

But one last question needed to be answered before the new evidence could be admitted in an appeal. Cooke’s car had a plastic visor to shield the driver from glare and the police had always maintained that if Cooke had killed Rosemary the visor would have been damaged.

After various experiments, Haight was able to demonstrate that the flexibility of the plastic visor meant that it snapped back into shape after the impact.

Armed with this compelling evidence and Estelle Blackburn’s best-selling book on the case, Button’s lawyers were able to argue successfully that the original prosecution case was fatally flawed.

It was not until 2000 that John Button was finally exonerated of the manslaughter of Rosemary Anderson having, in his words, been ‘imprisoned by the injustice of the whole affair’ for the previous 37 years.

The Hitch-Hiker Killings

Ed Kemper, whose parents separated when he was seven, grew up troubled and sadistic. He tortured animals; he once cut the hands and feet off his sister’s doll. But with people he was painfully shy. When his sister teased him about secretly wanting to kiss his teacher, he said:

‘If I kissed her, I’d have to kill her first.’

And this is precisely what the adult Ed Kemper – 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighing almost 300 pounds – did. But first there was a teenage prelude. For in 1962, when he was 13, he ran away from the mother he hated to join his father – and his father promptly sent him back. Unwanted by either, he was despatched to live with his grandparents on a ranch in California; and two years later he shot them both dead. He was, in other words, a serial time-bomb which had already begun to go off.

After five years in a hospital for the criminally insane, he was released into the care of his mother, who was then living in Santa Cruz. It was a bitter household. But Kemper got a job as a labourer, and finally bought himself a car. He began to pick up hitch-hikers.

On May 7th 1972, he picked up two women students from Fresno State College, Anita Luchese and Mary Anne Pesce, held them at gunpoint and drove them out to a wooded canyon. He stabbed them both to death and raped their corpses, before taking the bodies back home in the trunk of his car. Upstairs in his room, he took off their heads with his hunting knife – nicknamed ‘the General’ – had sex again with their corpses and then dissected them. He buried what was left in the mountains.

Four months later, on September 14th, he picked up a fifteen-year-old high-school student, and again drove her, at gunpoint, up into the mountains. He taped her mouth and suffocated her by sticking his fingers up her nostrils. Then, as earlier, he raped her, took her home and cut off her head, had sex with her again and dismembered her. His mother noticed nothing unusual as he took her remains out to the car in garbage bags for disposal.

After another four-month interval, in January 1973, he struck again, and again his victim was a student, this time at Cabrillo College. Claudia Schall was shot on a quiet road near Freedom, California, dumped into the trunk and then hidden in a closet in Kemper’s bedroom. The following morning, after his mother had gone to work, he violated her corpse and then cut it up with an axe in the shower.