Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono | The Hillside Stranglers - Part 1
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and episode 208. I am your humble host.

Thomas Rosland Weyberg Thun, and tonight I bring to you a fresh new serial killer superstar expose. When I started doing this podcast seven years ago, I had no idea just how many serial killers there were. This being my second job, as well as my greatest hobby, I am always aware that one day I probably will run out of subjects.

But so far, I have a healthy list of notorious killers, and the most famous of them all, the serial killer superstars, have not all been covered either. In the golden age of serial murder, which most people define as the latter part of the 1970s, a pair of truly depraved killers roamed California, hunting young women to rape and kill.

In total, the peer murdered at least ten innocent young women, and one of the killers murdered an additional two on his own. I am, of course, talking about none other than the Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, and this is their saga. Enjoy.

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I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.

And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Murder! Murder most foul! Such were the utterance in Victorian times when the very rare occurrence of murder took place.

Murders 150 years ago in America naturally occurred, as it always has, up through history, but it was rare. During the golden age of serial murder, which, in my view, began in the late 1960s and never really stopped, murder has become commonplace.

not committed by serial killers, but drugs and alienation made sure that the value of human life seemed to drop drastically. But, dear listener, even in a society numbed by violence, certain murders gain publicity by virtue of their sheer brutality and depravity.

When certain human monsters rear their heads, the routines of daily life are interrupted by a mass anxiety in the general public. They grow afraid. Such was the atmosphere of Los Angeles in the 1970s when the term "hillside strangler" entered the city's and even the whole Union's vocabulary.

For some reason, most people think of this case in the singular, i.e. one strangler. But there were most definitely two hillside stranglers. They were cousins, aged 44 and 26 at the time they began killing women in Los Angeles in 1977.

Between October of that year and February 1978, they raped, tortured and strangled to death ten young women and girls, dumping the bruised and stripped bodies mostly on hillsides northeast of downtown. During Thanksgiving week alone, five bodies turned up, the victims ranging in age from 12 to 28.

Note how young the killer's victims were. Twelve years old. A child. As with many serial killer cases, the media, for some reason, gloss over the fact that pedophilia played an important role in the killer's perverted sexual hunger.

These foiv were linked to at least three other killings. In December, another body was found nude and spread-eagled on a hillside-facing city hall, as though the killers were making an obscene statement to society in general, saying proudly, and here I paraphrase, "'Look, here is your young and beautiful, taken and ravaged by us, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.'"

Then, as suddenly as the killings had begun, they stopped. Then, a year later, one of the killers were caught after he had murdered two young women on his own. It was obvious that the killing duo had one sophisticated psychopath who knew how to get away with murder and one idiot pervert who simply did what he was told.

When the moron acted out his lusts on his own, he got caught almost immediately, and it did not take long for the police to round up his accomplice. The case was front-page news for months, and there have been movies and books written about it. In 1989, the made-for-TV movie The Case of the Hillside Stranglers came out.

Then, almost 15 years later, the film with the incorrect title, The Hillside Strangler, premiered in 2004. It did not do well at the box office. As with so many serial killer cases, certain things are mysterious. It is clear that Bianchi and Buono are serial killer superstars, almost in the same league as Bundy and Dahmer.

But their crimes were not particularly nefarious by serial killer standards, nor did they rack up the greatest body count. But still, there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the case which makes it stand out. Perhaps it is the era and location of the crimes. It is so quintessential American and iconic of the golden age of serial murder.

The bright California sun shining down on beautiful dead young girls laying naked, spread eagle for all the world to see, as tired, dirty, hairy-looking detectives look on in frustration and despair. But before I reveal too much of this dark true crime plot, let us stop and take a closer look. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a young and beautiful girl

Nude and obviously sexually violated and tortured, she lay on her back in the flowerbed like a discarded doll. Her head was turned toward the northern hills, eyes shut, legs spread, fingers trapped beneath her buttocks. The killer, the killers, had made sure her corpse would appear as if she offered herself up for sexual sacrifice.

Ants crawled across her belly, leaving red bites. She was murdered, and so far, nameless. Sergeant Frank Salerno, bending one knee to the ground to look, could almost feel the squeeze of the rope at her neck, which was encircled by a line of dark purplish bruise. Rope, or twine, or cord. She had been strangled.

Strangulation by ligature was the phrase that occurred to him. He would use it in his report. It was now just after eight in the morning of Halloween, 1977. A grey day, the air about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, that's about 13 degrees Celsius, cold by California standards. Salerno, a detective with the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department,

had been called from his bed to examine the body. It had been discovered at six o'clock, where it now lay about two and a half feet, about one meter, from the curb at 2844 Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta, a middle-class town in the foothills just north of Glendale.

Charles Cone, who had the habit of leaving his house at four each morning to go to work at his electrical shop and returning home at six to eat breakfast and check on his family, had noticed the body as he parked in front of his house in the early light. Forgetting what he had learned from hundreds of television cop shows about not disturbing evidence, Cone had covered the body with a tarp as a family man.

His instincts for decency had trumped any cold reasoning. Other detectives who had arrived before Salerno were professionals and knew not to tamper with a crime scene. As lead investigator, Salerno removed the tarp carefully, hoping that nothing important had been lost. She was pale.

"'Small and thin, maybe forty-one kilos. "'To him, the girl did not appear particularly pretty, but not ugly either. "'Her straight reddish-brown hair was neither long nor short. "'She could have lived no more than fifteen or sixteen years.'

Scrutinizing her, Salerno reflected that in a decade as a sheriff's deputy, and in more than two years with homicide, he had never seen a body like this. He noted ligature marks at five points: neck, wrists, and ankles. The wrist and ankle bruises were fainter and more irregular than the line on her neck. She must have been tied, or handcuffed, or both.

Her open mouth revealed blood along the upper gum line. Her body bore no other signs. But as he stared at her face, leaning in closer, Salerno noticed something on her right eyelid. A speck, a white tuft of something, a wispy bit of fluff. He picked it off and held it up to the overcast sky.

It looked like angel's hair, the stuff you put on Christmas trees. It would have to be analyzed. It might be all they had, and it might be nothing. He hoped it had not come from the tarp. He rolled her over. Nothing. He assumed that she had been raped. But the coroner would determine that. He stepped back to take in the scene.

The body, lying so close and parallel to the street, could not have been missed as the people of the neighborhood began their Monday. Salerno reasoned it must have been placed there deliberately, not tossed or dropped randomly. On the north side of the street, a chain-link fence, covered with oleander bushes, bordered a big storm basin.

Had the killer or killers wished to conceal the body, he or they could have forced it up over the fence, where it would not have been noticed until the smell got bad.

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visit betterhelp dot com slash serial killer to-day to get ten per cent off your first month that's better help h e l p dot com slash serial killer the more salerno looked at the position of the body the more it seemed to him to have been placed there by two men or more than two

They had probably removed it from a car, carried it over the curb and put it down. There were no drag marks, neither on the body nor on the ice-plant, also known as carpet-weed, that still wet with dew, covered the curb. One man could have carried her, but it was unlikely. Salerno knew that he had no proof that there had been two, nor even that they were men, but he assumed it.

He was confident of his instincts. There would not be enough in court, but they were enough for him now. It was a quiet neighborhood, heavily planted high up in the hills above Foothill Boulevard, old Route 66, remote enough to make Salerno wonder from the start why, having traveled this far up, someone would pick this street to dump a body.

Alta Terra's drive was accessible only from La Crescenta Boulevard. At its other end, it dead-ended. But someone this far up could have gone on only a little farther and hidden the body where it would not have been found so quickly. Relatively prosperous working people lived here. They were not rich,

But they were well-off and respectable. They would notify the police immediately of anything unusual, as Charles Cone had. The houses, one story, ranch-style, had wonderful views of the city to the south at night, or when there was enough wind to dissipate the smog. You could see Forest Lawn from Alta Terrace and, to the west, the San Fernando Valley.

Then Salerno noticed something that confirmed, or at least supported his hypothesis, that there had been two men. A portion of the ice plant next to the curb, almost directly opposite the girl's feet, had been pushed out of place, tufted up eighteen inches or more, and folded back from the curb. He bent down. The scene materialized in Salerno's imagination.

Two men had removed the body from a car. One had carried her by the head or had gripped her under the arms. The other had held her feet or had gripped her under the knees. The man carrying the upper part of her body had stepped across the curb first, and his momentum had caused the other man to trip on the curb or to stumble, catching the toe of his shoe under the ice plant.

Then they had put the body down. Perhaps she had been placed face down at first, then unhandcuffed and untied before being rolled over onto her back. Salerno speculated, well aware that he had no proof of much. Yet Salerno went into Charles Cone's house to talk to him and his wife. They had heard nothing during the night. Cone said he had slept like a log,

When he had left for work early in the morning, it was still very dark out, and he had not seen anything. When asked about the scuffed-up ice-plants, Cone confirmed that it had been pristine the day before. He would have noticed if it had been messed up like it had been during the night. He was a man who took pride in his lawn and took good care of his property.

When asked about the tarp, Cone said that he had taken it from the backyard, where it had been used to cover some toys. Not doubting the family man, but eager to dot every I and cross every T, he still checked in the backyard. Salerno was sorry to see the stuffed animals, some of which had fuzz that might indeed be the wispy stuff he had plucked from the girl's eyelids.

For the same reason, Salerno was not very happy about the Cohn family white poodle. He called in the man from the sheriff's crime laboratory and had him cut samples from the dog and the toys. Angelo Buono looked like a gargoyle, which was ironic considering his surname meant good in Italian. He had huge hands, with thumbs on them the size of zucchinis.

they hung down from his long sinewed arms the hands swung backward as he walked he was wiry about five foot ten he had sicilian coloring i e olive skin and black hair he was kind to animals and had a way with the ladies

The latter probably had something to do with his very large penis and confident behavior, not his physical appearance, which was quite hideous. In the autumn of his forty-fourth year, Buona was lying on his king-sized waterbed, dressed in his customary blue work pants and short-sleeved shirt, and he was bored. There was nothing on TV.

He got up to straighten one of the framed family photographs on the wall. His son Peter, still in full marine dress uniform, posed before an American flag. Below Peter, Angelo Buono Sr., deceased, looked content as he was grinning in his dark security guard's uniform.

Further along the wall hung a small Italian flag, and next to it a print of an anonymous early Italian Renaissance Madonna, eternally serene, gazed at the room with ancient eyes. The middle-aged man wandered through his house, straightening, checking for dust.

In the den, he tidied shelves of knick-knacks, his SIBO lighter collection, antique model cars, a plastic sphinx, a miniature barber's pole, poker chips and playing cards, against which was propped a little wooden sign reading, "'Candy's dandy, but sex won't rot your teeth.'"

He made sure his files of Penthouse and Playboy magazines, two neat piles on a bottom shelf, were in order. He opened the glass door of his gun case and dusted his five rifles, two .45 caliber pistols and Thompson submachine gun. Everything was as it was supposed to be. Angelo Buono was proud of his home.

he had tired of sharing apartments putting up with other people's habits and tastes having others eyes on him bono trusted no one he had found this place at seven or three east colorado street in glendale in nineteen seventy five

one of a very few inhabited one-story frame residences left on a street that was now four lanes and dominated by franchise restaurants, small businesses, and the general offices of Bob's Big Boy Hamburgers. It was ideal for him because he could live in the house and have his auto upholstery shop in a converted garage at the back.

His girlfriends or children could come to stay, but he could kick them out when he chose. He had worked hard on the house, painting the outside a homey yellow with brown trim. Inside, he had selected an eggshell white for the walls and put down Mexican tile in the kitchen and dining area. He covered the spare bedroom's floor with wear-resistant auto-carpeting.

he hung his pictures mingling family sentiment with aesthetic preferences a romantic seascape with italian fishermen for instance next to a photograph of his daughter and another of a girl called peaches he did very little cooking but other than that buono was a domestic sort of fellow

In the living room, he lowered himself into the brown vinyl easy chair, rested his feet on the beanbag hassock, and stared at the lighted fish tank, listening to the hum of its electric pump. Bono liked angelfish. The little castle the fish swam through had fallen over. He got up, put the castle right, and sprinkled fish food on the water. The fish rose to the food, and he remembered the rabbits.

He walked back through the kitchen and out the side door around where the hutches were, between the house and the shop. Across the garage door, Angelo Trimshop was spray-painted in black graffiti script. Out back, his yellow mutt, Sparky, greeted him and rolled over. Bono scratched Sparky's belly. Then he opened the hutches and gave food pellets to the rabbits, stroking them with his big hands, mumbling at them.

he heard a car pull into the driveway. He could tell from the sound of the motor that it was Kenneth Bianchi's Cadillac. They went into the house together. Kenneth Bianchi was twenty-six and more fashion-conscious than his cousin. This evening he wore a three-quarter length brown leather coat, jeans and leather shoes. His dark hair was freshly permed, not naturally curly like Uno's.

Bianchi was just under six feet and slim at 180 pounds, around 82 kilos. With his moustache he looked like one of the many thousands of young men in Southern California who aspired to stardom but had not landed a role. Something in his manner suggested that he thought he was being photographed.

If you stretched the imagination, he kind of looked a bit like Burt Reynolds, but not so tan. The acne scars on his neck lent some character to a bland, though not unhandsome, face. Lately, he had been working for a land title company, where he always wore a dark three-piece suit and carried an attaché case, the eager young executive look.

He was called a title officer, though he was for all intents and purposes only a clerk. From time to time, he lost conviction in his moustache and shaved it off. The perm, too, was a matter of whim from month to month. He was a man easy not to recognize. After some conversation and a couple of drinks, the pair decided to head out. They decided to hunt.

That night, the 30th of October, 1977, Bo'uno and Bianchi cruised slowly west on Hollywood Boulevard in the 72-four-door Cadillac, white vinyl top over metallic dark blue body. A sticker bearing the official seal of the County of Los Angeles was displayed on the lower left-hand corner of the windshield.

They were enjoying that presumptive arrogance peculiar to Los Angeles, that if you are driving around in a good car in L.A., you are somehow luckier and freer and more privileged and more, for lack of a better word, cool than the poor slobs in the rest of the country. Bono drove, as he had since high school, slumped down, his right wrist controlling the wheel.

Buono, as always, talked strategy. He reminded the younger and inexperienced Bianchi that most of the girls had pimps who watched out for unmarked police cars. The best way to proceed would be to not immediately use their trump card, masquerading as cops. Instead, they would lure the girls in.

Once they had spotted a girl they liked, Bianchi would get out and wait somewhere, while the other picked up the girl, acting like a regular sex client, a.k.a. a jar. Bono was, again as usual, driving, so he would pick up the girl. Then he would drive to where Bianchi was waiting.

Then, Bianchi would show the police badge and tell her she was under arrest, get her into the back seat, and handcuff her so she wouldn't and couldn't make any trouble. Bono handed Bianchi the wallet and handcuffs. It was go-to.

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And with that, we come to the end of part one in this series, which will be several episodes covering the saga of the Hillside Stranglers. In two weeks, I will bring you part two. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.