Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono | The Hillside Stranglers - Part 5
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 212. I am your humble host, Thomas Rosland Weyborg Thun. And tonight, we continue the tale of the Hillside Stranglers. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono.

We left off last episode with the duo planning to rape, torture, and murder a child. Tonight, I take you back in time to take a closer look at especially Angelo Buono's childhood and youth. Enjoy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal Patreones. They are...

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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. Even before he had begun murdering women, Angelo Buono had not been living the humdrum life of any ordinary upholsterer. If not glamorous, neither were his days dull.

There were fast cars and frequent women. Fortunately for his wives, his marriages ended in divorce. But from youth, he was a ladies' man and a lady-killer in spirit long before flesh. Buono, a rampant narcissist, even gave himself a nickname, the Italian Stallion.

He claimed Sicilian breeding, and there is no reason to doubt the purity of line, but he was born in Rochester, New York, on the 5th of October 1934, the child of native-born parents and immigrant grandparents.

his parents divorced and he arrived in los angeles in the year of gone with the wind nineteen thirty nine accompanied by his mother and his ten-year-old sister cecilia they settled in that section of the city of angels then known as dogtown so christened for its nearness to the municipal animal pound northeast of downtown and union station

Only an old-timer would have called it Dogtown after World War II. By then, it was Highland Park, the south edge of Glendale, and also, according to signs and maps, but never in the common tongue, the Elysian Valley, one of those places in Southern California like El Contendo Drive and La Placentia and Happy Valley.

Named by way of some real estate developer's marketing idea, its most prominent feature was the Southern Pacific Freightyard.

With its freeways and broad streets and railroad tracks, the Eleusinian Valley had by the 1960s become nearly all steel and concrete, and except for rare days of wet or breezy weather, its air was extremely polluted. In the 70s, it was still favored by newcomers to the city.

the chinese descendants of railroad workers had stayed on but the irish originally railroad workers also had scattered westward supplanted mostly by mexicans the dog pound had yielded its place as touchstone to dodger stadium

for forty years the elysian valley remained not the abode assigned by the greeks to their blessed after death but buono's stomping grounds

he rarely strayed farther from it than hollywood and although he often moved and married his mother's house at three one one three la cleed avenue just off glendale boulevard was the central hub of his life until her death in nineteen seventy eight

it must have been difficult for jennie sciolino buono to maintain the small bungalow in the early years her salary as a piece worker in a shoe factory where she did top stitching was minimal

Angelo Buono Sr. later remarried and moved to Los Angeles to work as a security guard, but he was a remote, silent figure, and he had acquired another family to support. After her children were grown, Jenny would marry George White, an American Indian, but she raised the children on her own. Although Jenny's family were practicing Roman Catholics,

Buono had no formal religious instruction, and what spiritual inspiration he obtained from attending Mass did not impart with it a sense of sin. If anything, the idea of sinning turned young Buono on. Junior Buono, as his mother, much to his annoyance, called him, had his mind on other things than learning how to read, write, and do math at school.

only the indifference or liberality of teachers enabled him to pass through elementary school and washington irving junior high on to john marshall high school it cannot be said of him that he grew up too hopeful and trusting he believed he could figure out life for himself without the aid of education or authority

By the time he enrolled at Marshall High, he thought he had figured out something about his mother, and he began referring to her, his own mother, as, and here I quote, that cunt, end quote. It was a title that rang so true to him that he continued to use it in reference to his mother, and later to all other women, for the rest of his life.

Though he had no evidence for it, other than that Jenny did have boyfriends, he considered his mother loose, a whore. Throughout his manhood, he told intimates of being taken along by Jenny as a child on visits to men. He would be kept waiting outside, he said, while she would go with a man. He said he knew what she had been up to, and in this she was no different from all women.

At a young age, Buono found that he could break Jenny down by calling her a whore and accusing her of sleeping with repairmen, shop owners, and delivery boys in return for favors, a reduced bill, or a free radio or refrigerator. Jenny would deny his accusations, but he could get at her that way, and in other ways.

one of his favorites was to bring home a black girl and announce his engagement knowing that his so much as dating a black girl would infuriate jenny as to women bono was no racist they were all the same to him and it gave him satisfaction to observe his mother's anxiety at his black date

Indeed, Bohonno had formed in his mind his concept of the proper function of women by the time he was fourteen.

Basically, all Buono wanted from girls from age 14 was to pick up one who was hitchhiking, take her to some secluded place, and rape her and quote-unquote fuck her in the ass, as he phrased it, showing a precocious awareness of sodomy even at such a young age. Remember, this was before even the idea of internet.

It was just talk then, but one of his friends, Stillman Sorrentino, was confused by Buono's boasts. Sorrentino was fairly sure he knew what rape was, but he had no idea why Buono, or anyone, would want to have sex with a girl in the ass. Stillman thought Buono perhaps meant something else. Sorrentino was so puzzled that he asked his parents what Buono had meant.

they forbade him ever to see or speak to buono again buono quit high school at sixteen and by that time he was getting himself into a lot of trouble picking fights and running with gangs stealing and earning a reputation as a tough bad character

When he was first arrested for grand theft auto and committed to the California Youth Authority, he managed to escape, but when he was re-arrested in December 1951, the juvenile authorities decided that he needed to cool off for a spell at the Paso Robles School for Boys in Central California, where he celebrated his 17th Christmas.

the reformatory did not unsurprisingly reform him out on parole he would drive around with his buddies looking for girls or in the parlance of the day for some guy to choose off marshall high was always a good place to spot a victim

It was common for those who had left school to hang around and bully the students. One afternoon, Buono and his pals cruised by as school was letting out and noticed a boy standing alone with his books, waiting for a ride. The boy was wearing a maroon satin jacket with the name Aristocrats spelled out across its back. Buono ordered the car to stop and told his buddies that he wanted that jacket.

He got out of the car while his three buddies waited. Then he walked up to the solitary boy. The boy was much smaller than Buono, and the idea of exerting power over a weaker person thrilled Buono. When told to take off his jacket so that Buono could try it on, the boy hesitated.

But when Buono, long thumbs in pockets, feet apart, pelvis forward, stepped closer, the boy slipped off the jacket and handed it over. Buono's friends lounged against the car, waiting with glee in their eyes. Buono told the boy the jacket looked good and that he intended to keep it. Then he started to walk away. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. The boy came after him and jumped on his back. Bono threw him off, turned and slapped his face, and his three buddies came running up to help. The boy panicked and ran away.

In the next coming days, Bono worked at removing the word aristocrats from the back of the jacket. He had gotten only as far as the first two letters, but was wearing the jacket when one afternoon, the boy and four older kids spotted him at a gas station and surrounded him. Bono gave the jacket back, but the next day the boy appeared at Bono's house, again accompanied by his four older friends.

He pointed to the missing letters. He did not want a jacket that said "Istocrats." He wanted money to repair the jacket. Bono ran out onto his front porch, pulled out his pocket knife, and offered to cut the face of anybody who tried to get money from him. This scared them off. The boy, a person with proper character and spine, did not let up.

He instead reported the entire incident to the police. Buono was promptly called in and warned that he was facing jail if he continued getting into trouble. Buono said it had all been a misunderstanding and blamed the boy for falsely accusing him. The police did not buy his story and Buono ended up paying the unnamed boy every penny. As with most psychopaths, Buono was a coward at heart.

As long as his victims were younger, smaller, and weaker than him, he acted tough. But as soon as someone proved stronger than he expected, or, as in the case of Jacket Boy, brought in reinforcements, Bono was quick to submit, give up, and pay up. He was, both as a youth and as an adult, a pathetic excuse for a man.

One thing Buono lacked growing up was a positive male role model. So he found one instead. He was Carol Chessman, known as the Red Light Bandit, who had been arrested and convicted in 1948 on charges of kidnapping with infliction of bodily harm, a crime then punishable by death in California, and sexual assault.

Chessman's crimes and mode of operation, his scam, made an indelible mark on Buono's mind, for Chessman had demonstrated the possibilities of a police ruse. The red light he had attached to his car enabled him to con lovers parked in the hills of Los Angeles into opening their car windows and doors to him. They took him for a policeman, telling them to move on,

Showing a .45 caliber, Chessman would force the girl into his own car, drive her to another secluded spot, and usually make her perform oral sex. Unfortunately, from Buono's point of view, Chessman failed to kill his victims, so their testimony assured conviction. But Buono admired Chessman for more than the scant.

by nineteen fifty one chessman was acting as his own attorney on appeal and his manipulation of the law enabled him to fend off his own execution for twelve years he became the most notable if that is the word jail-house lawyer in california history

To Buono, he was a heroic combination of guts and brains. No everyday rapist. A man who could stand up to the system and, if not beat it, foul it up beautifully. Buono always worked on some job or other as he grew into adulthood. I can say a lot of negative things about Buono, but one thing that he was not was a slacker.

He started out working as a bricklayer, then moved on to working in auto garages. When he got involved with auto upholstering, he knew he had found his trade of choice. As a result of his hard work, Bono always had some money in his pocket, and he dated a lot of girls.

at twenty he cut a dashing figure in a raffish sort of way favouring suits dark shirts and bright ties in imitation of movie gangsters and somehow he drove cadillacs he hung around the old van de kamps drive-in at the corner of fletcher and san fernando road it was a good place to meet girls

but his favorite place to make girls parking was landa street an obscure little road up in the hills on the western side of the elysian valley just beyond elysian park it was and it remained very hard to find

Paved, but more of a track than a road. Heavily wooded, with owls and bats and coyotes that wandered over from Griffith Park. At night you could see the lights of the city from Landa, but the street itself was dark. A Halloween sort of place, ghostly enough to make a girl want to cling.

a place that might have been imported, with its running ivy and morning-glory of vines, from some less arid clime than Southern California's. Hardly anyone traveled it, except lovers, people who got lost, and people looking for an obscure spot to dump trash. And there was enough trash dumped on Landa's slopes to make it stink.

Buono liked to call it the cow patch, by which he meant that it stank like a cow pie. But still, the cow patch was the best place to take a girl. As a certain US president once said, you could grab the girls by the pussy there, and they would let you do it. It may have been at the cow patch that Buono got Geraldine Yvonne Vinal pregnant in April 1955. She was 17, from Marshall High.

he did what any gentleman would do he made geraldine a june bride a protestant minister performed the ceremony and this upset buono's mother but within a week buono had left never to return to his first wife

Their son, Michael Lee Buono, who in the 1970s moved to North California and toured with a band called the Sidewinders, was born on the 10th of January, 1956, and shortly afterward, Geraldine filed for divorce. The court awarded her $20 a month in alimony, but she never saw a penny from Buono.

Michael knew his father, but Buono would not permit his son to call him dad. And in the Buono family, whose holiday celebrations she sometimes attended, Geraldine became known as Aunt Jerry. Buono had not been around to celebrate Michael's birth. Two months before the event, he had been sentenced to sixty days in the county jail for petty theft. He had been arrested on suspected auto theft.

but once released, Buono lost no time with the ladies. By the end of 1956, he had fathered another son, Angelo Anthony Buono III, and on the 15th of April 1957, he married Angelo III's mother, Mary Catherine Castillo, in time for her to give birth later that year to his third son, Peter Buono.

His fourth, Danny, was born in 1958, and his fifth, Louis, in 1960, and a daughter, Grace, in 1962.

It was a Roman Catholic ceremony, this time performed by the Reverend K. R. O'Brien, who was able to sanctify the nuptials because Buono could claim the Pauline privilege, which then denied the validity of a non-Catholic marriage for a Catholic. In the eyes of the Church, this was Buono's first marriage.

and it can be said of it that it lasted longer though it was no happier than the protestant one mary catherine called candy was seventeen when she married bono they had quartered at the cow-patch at first when they married they lived in a cottage behind jenny's house

then they moved to huntington drive then to coolidge to highland park boulevard to york to casitas finally to glover where in nineteen sixty four they divorced all of the houses were within a two or three mile radius of jenny's but there were seven moves in seven years and candy bore buono a child in every year but two she found him a difficult husband

It was Buono's violence and sexual behavior which finally drove Candy to divorce. She did not like Buono's calling her a cunt, and she was disgusted when he referred to Jenny by the same word, and he made her feel like one. One night during their first year together, he appeared in their bedroom with rope in his hands,

tied her spread-eagle to the bed-posts and raped her so violently that she feared for her life more and more as the years passed her pain seemed to give him his greatest pleasure when she failed to respond to his pinches and slaps and pile-driver poundings he would tell her she was a dead piece of ass nor did she share his passion for anal intercourse

But Bovina was not a man to be denied. Although he never drank, he beat and kicked her when she failed to please him, and far from caring whether the children witnessed the beatings, he seemed to want them to watch. One afternoon in 1963, when the children ranged in age from one to seven, she refused him what he considered his prerogative, and he decided to teach her a lesson.

He dragged her into the living room, threw her down on the floor in front of the children, and forced himself up her backside. It was about this time that Buono accused Candy of having an affair with his cousin Joe. She, at last, decided that no matter what she would be facing trying to raise the children alone, she had to get rid of him, and went through with the divorce.

Buono was not long without a mate. In 1965, he began living with Nanette Campina, a 25-year-old from New York whom he had met on a blind date. Although this union was never made official by church or state, it lasted as long as his marriage to Candy and resembled it in many ways. Nanette already had two children, Annette and Danny,

But Buono's paternal urge was still unspent, and he sired Tony in 1967 and Sam in 1969. By his thirty-fifth year, he had multiplied himself eight times, with enough sons to ensure that the Buono line would not vanish with him.

He beat Nanette as he had candy, but this time he told his woman that if she ever so much as considered leaving him, he would kill her or have her killed. He had friends, he said, powerful people he called the boys, and they would hunt her down no matter where she went. She stayed.

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