Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono | The Hillside Stranglers - Part 3
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and... Episode 210. I am your humble host, Thomas Rosland Weyberg Thule. And tonight we continue the tale of the Hillside Stranglers. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono.

We left off last episode with the grisly details of the Strangler's first torture-murder done as a pair. Tonight, we continue where we left off and head out on the highway of mayhem the Cousins created. Enjoy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal Patreones. They are...

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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. Bianchi took her under the knees. Uno under the arm. They carried the dead young woman through the kitchen. Her dangling arms flopped about, hit the floor hard.

One hand clonked against the washing machine. 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. Bono got in the driver's seat and 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.

Far up into the hills, Buono turned left onto Alta Terrace Drive. He cut the headlights and rolled slowly along the street. In the darkness, Buono pointed to a two-story white house halfway down the street. Bianchi was confused and asked Buono where they were. His cousin replied, and I quote,

That's where that cunt Melinda Hooper lives. I picked her up there a couple of times. Had dinner there. Wait till she wakes up tomorrow. She'll get some surprise. End quote. Quietly and quickly they picked up the girl, Bruno 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 one would throwing someone into a swimming-pool. Neither the press nor television paid much attention to Buono and Bianchi's gruesome act, 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 prostitutes, 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 and i quote 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 La Crescenta residence. Investigators said the victim, described as between 16 and 22, 5 feet 2 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 Teres Drive, La Crescenta. End quote. 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 quite a distance from Hollywood, runaways in Southern California gravitated towards 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, that's around seven degrees Celsius, 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 Cone'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 fibre Salerno had taken from the girl's eyelid "'had been inconclusive, except that it had not come "'from the Cones' toys or from their poodle.'

And so it was that Salerno began walking Hollywood Boulevard through the nights, questioning its transient citizens, showing them the drawings and asking whether they knew the girl. These were the dropouts. Addicts and pushers, bikers, prostitutes, socially and sexually displaced persons, entrepreneurs of the transitory, a new American class.

They had the drive of the legendary forty-niners of old, 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 or by name, and they knew vaguely when somebody overdosed or simply disappeared.

Outwardly, they resembled refugees from the hate-Ashbury culture of the 60s, favoring leather and denim and lots of hair and acid-rock paleolithic look, except for the male prostitutes, whom were typecast for an Andy Warhol movie. They had street names like Stinkyfoot, Sunshine Sally, Eggnog, Youngblood,

"'Cowboy Dave, Pig Valve, Flaky 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, threaded her way. "'The street people depressed Frank Salerno. "'They sometimes made him indignant. "'He 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. 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, "'apparing 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 Debbie, maybe Donna.' "'When he got what he could out of them, "'he would thank them and go on. "'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 two of the street people independently gave the girl in the drawing the same name, Judy Miller, that Salerno knew he was getting closer. 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. If a witness knew something, you never got it all on the first interview.

"'Sometimes you didn't get it until the 10th.' He gave them his card and asked them to phone him if they remembered anything else or heard anything.

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And then everything changed.

On Sunday morning, the 6th of November, 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 a 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. That's almost ten kilometers. In Los Angeles, that was close.

More links established themselves the next day, when the girl's mother identified her as Lisa Kastin, a twenty-one-year-old waitress at the Health Fair 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 hard-working, 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 health fair at about 9.15 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 customer or customers and had then been killed and dumped in the same general area. 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 Lisa 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 the 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 Lisa Kastin had been found and noticed a three-foot guardrail between the road and the body site. Surely it had taken two men to get the body over that rail cleanly. Salerno became sure that the two murders were linked and had been committed by the same two perpetrators, and if he was right, he was sure there would be more bodies showing up soon.

He had a serial killer case on his hands. The wind from the east was whipping Bono's Italian flag Saturday night, the 5th of November, when Bianchi arrived at Bono's house. He had been telephoning all week, anxious to make thorough preparations. But Bono had been secretive, as usual, saying he would take care of everything. All Bianchi had to do was follow orders.

Bono had suggested, however, that it would be a good idea for Bianchi to obtain a police badge too, and had tipped him off to a swap meet where you could get anything you wanted. Badges, guns, uniforms. Bianchi found Bono watching television in the den and proudly showed him the new badge. It was the star of the California Highway Patrol. Bono told him he was a moron.

He had been supposed to get a proper LAPD shield, but, after a short reprimand, he calmed down and simply said that the bitches they were after would not be able to spot the difference. Originally, Bianchi had had plans that Saturday with his girlfriend Kelly. When Bono had called upon him to join in on a new project, he had told Kelly he had changed his mind and that he needed some sorely needed alone time.

She had been furious, and the big fight had started. As he left, he had said all manner of terrible things to his pregnant girlfriend, for example that he wished she had taken an abortion and that no one likes a whiny pregnant woman. When he was with Buono, all thoughts of his girlfriend went out the window. Bianchi followed Buono into the kitchen. On the counter, he had laid everything out—tape, foam, rag, cord—

so prudent he had already cut everything into the right lengths. He had even stuck the foam onto a long piece of tape, so that all they would have to do was apply it to their future victim's eyes and wrap her head. Outside, at the car, the wind blowing, the night smogless and starry, Bono had another idea and stepped into his shop. He produced a flashlight,

bright metal with a red plastic rim around the glass. It would serve them well in pretending to be investigating police officers. Bianchi drove this time. At the corner of San Fernando and Los Feliz, just a couple of blocks from Forest Lawn, Buono pointed to a Mexican fast food restaurant and told his cousin to pull in there as he was hungry.

as they were eating. Suddenly, Buono called out and pointed across the street. He had spotted one of his ex-wives, Candy, and their daughter, Grace. Bianchi beeped, everyone waved and smiled, and Bianchi headed the Cadillac for Hollywood. They turned down Weston and out sunset to the Strip, passing Connie's, the railroad diner, glancing at each other to acknowledge a now hallowed spot.

The strip was alive. The traffic thick. The sidewalks crowded. Too crowded for a pickup. At La Cienaga Boulevard, Buono told Bianchi to head back toward Hollywood. They would try the side streets, the dimly lit ones. Once again, Buono had an idea. To him, a really great idea.

He outlined the possibilities. Simply put, he told his cousin that they shouldn't limit themselves to prostitutes. They could stop a girl, any girl. Once she's in the car, it's all over. It could be a nun. It could be a lawyer. It could be a student. It didn't matter. They were in control.

The future victim didn't have to be walking either. They could spot some girl driving alone and just follow her. She would stop somewhere. She would be driving home. She would then lead them to some side street with nobody on it, and they could make their move. Bianchi agreed that it could work. It was worth a try. With this scam, there was no telling what they could do. Then they spotted her.

a dark-headed girl driving a lime-green beetle convertible the beetle turned right on to franklin with the cadillac in pursuit crossed cahuenga and vine passed under the hollywood freeway and turned left on argyle avenue a street of apartment houses near the corner of argyle and dick's street the girl stopped against a curb and switched off her lights

As the girl got out of her car and started to lock the door, Bohuno and Bianchi were on her. Bohuno had his flashlight. "'Police officers,' Bianchi said, quickly showing her his new badge, which he had pinned to his wallet, and just as quickly slipping it back into the pocket of his leather coat. Then he asked for ID. The girl fumbled in her purse and brought out her driver's license.'

Bianchi glanced at the license and handed it to Buono, who shone his flashlight on it. Unlike prostitutes, this woman was not used to being harassed by police officers, and she instinctively knew something was very wrong. When Buono talked about how she was a suspect in a robbery due to her car being similar to one seen at the crime scene, she protested.

There were thousands of cars like hers, and the two men had no right to detain her. But Bianchi was nothing if not charming and convincing when he needed to, especially to women. He said, and I quote, "'You don't want to make a huge scene right here in the street, do you? So you'd better just come with us, and if everything checks out, we'll bring you back again. If you haven't done anything, everything will check out.'"

That's what we have our systems for. You'd better step over to our car now. End quote. Lysakastin hesitated, then walked slowly over to the Cadillac. Buono opened the rear door and ushered her in. As they started up, Bianchi clicked the automatic door locks. He made a U-turn, headed east on Franklin and passed Tamarind Avenue, his own street.

At Western, he turned left, and Bono said, "'I'm going to have to put handcuffs on you.'" "'To everyone else, this is a desk. But to you, it's a launch pad. You're starting blood. This ain't a desk. This is opportunity.'"

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