Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono | The Hillside Stranglers - Part 6
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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 213. I am your humble host, Thomas Rosland Weyberg Thun. And tonight, we continue the tale of the Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono.

We left off last episode with the tale of Buno's childhood, youth and young adulthood. Tonight, we continue the background story of our killer duo. Enjoy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal Patreones. They are...

You are truly the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. Thank you.

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. By 1971, Nanette had finally worked up the courage to leave Buono.

She decided that she would rather risk death than remain with Bono, and she suspected, or hoped, that his threats were empty. Her daughter Annette, by then fourteen, had begun complaining that Bono was fondling her too intensely, and making obscene suggestions to her. And Nanette feared that Bono had achieved more than that with the girl.

Bono had even said of the child, and I quote, that she needs breaking in, end quote. Without telling him, one day Nanette put herself and the four children on the plane to Florida and never came back. A year later, Bono married a girl named Deborah Taylor at the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. But this was a mere lark. They never lived together, and they never bothered to get divorced.

Bono was learning not to take women too seriously. He changed apartments often, moving from Glendale over to the Oakwood Apartments above Forest Lawn Drive, then back to Glendale, and for a time he shared a place in the Silver Lake district known locally as the Swish Alps with Ralph Harper.

Harper was an aspiring actor who joined Bono in auto theft only when between roles. He appeared in productions of Hello, Dolly and Gaily, but lost out to Archie Moore, the light heavyweight champ for the part of Nigger Jim in the movie of Huckleberry Finn.

Harper's stage name was Artie Ford, and he was proud to be buddies with Jay Silverheels, who had played Tonto in the Lone Ranger television series. Through Artie Ford, Buono met a lot of Hollywood people, and began building his reputation as one of the few auto upholsterers who could work with classic and antique cars.

He did not yet have his own shop, but it was during this period that he fixed up a sports car belonging to Frank Sinatra and a limousine that was said to be Joe Bonanno's. Buono had a fine Italian hand with cars. Life in the Swiss Alps suited Buono for a time, but Artie Ford found him a difficult apartment mate.

He was obsessively neat, Ford thought. He would complain when anything, even a telephone receiver, was not put back properly. And he was constantly dusting and cleaning. And he had some peculiar habits. Their apartment overlooked a high school. And sometimes Artie Ford would catch Bono looking through binoculars at the students while playing with himself.

Artie thought this was normal enough, but he did not know what to think of Bono's boast that he had banged his stepdaughter, Annette Campino, who he said was just the right age, because young girls, and here I quote, "'pussies smell real good, like cheese.'"

Buono also claimed with pride that he had turned Annette over to his sons so that they could have a go at her, and that they had. Everyone had banged Annette, Buono said. But when Buono told Artie that he was so angry with Candy that he had snuck into her house and turned the gas on when she was out, hoping that she would light a cigarette when she got home and blow herself up,

Artie was alarmed, but Bono did not actually act on his alarming boasts, and the two remained friends. Eventually, Bono moved out. In 1975, Bono finally got what he had been thinking about for some time, his own shop, when he found the place at 703 East Colorado Street.

Now that he had resolved his financial responsibilities to his wives and children, he had been able to save enough money for a down payment on the property, and he was handy enough to do most of the painting and plumbing and carpeting himself. By the middle of that year, he was moved in and open for business, and he began living the kind of life that he knew was right for him.

a bachelor's life filled with women who could be dismissed when they had fulfilled their function and an independent business man's life with no one to call boss now he could set his own hours and when an opportunity presented itself he could seize it

He worked alone. When he needed someone to clean up or run an errand, he hired Frankie Anderson, a local kid whose nickname was Goofy. Buono had no use for an employee with an inquiring mind. For Buono, the setup on Colorado was perfect. With his shop behind his house, he hardly needed a car, and when he did need one, he would drive one of his customers' vehicles.

The location between the car wash and the glass shop gave his business exposure during the day and gave him privacy at night, and the metal awning he put up between the shop and his house shielded his activities from the view from the orange grove apartments behind.

It took him no time at all to establish himself and settle into his diurnal nocturnal routine and its variations. Soon Angelo was known throughout the neighborhood as an excellent upholsterer and a stud. The girls came around so often and in such numbers that Buono did not get a great deal of work done.

You can't fuck that much and become a millionaire, as someone said. But the situation suited Angelo Buono just fine. He would chat up the girls everywhere he found them, in restaurants, on the street, in local businesses, and he liked them young. The younger, the better. Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born on the 22nd of May, 1951.

the child of a Rochester prostitute. He never met his mother, but knew vaguely who she was, a woman whom he associated with bars and working-class nightclubs. She gave him up at birth, and at the age of three months, he was adopted from a foster home by Jenny Buono's sister, Frances Schiolioni Bianchi.

and her husband, a foundry worker fond of gambling, especially horse races. The Bianchis were no luckier at picking a child than at the ponies. Kenny appeared to have arisen from the cradle as a boy who never told the truth about anything. By the time he could talk, Frances knew she was coping with a compulsive liar.

and his childhood unfolded as one of idleness and shirking of responsibilities when he was five and a half frances became worried by his frequent lapses into trance-like states of day-dreaming she knew that this would not do when he went to school and she consulted a physician

the doctor hearing that little kenny's eyeballs would roll back into his head during these trances reached a diagnosis of petit mal seizures but they were apparently nothing to worry about he would grow out of them by the age of eleven

Kenny's inattention to schoolwork and his angry outbursts at home had become major worries to his adoptive mother, who, as a first-generation Italian-American, wondered whether her boy had been struck by the evil eye. His IQ tested out at 116, considered bright normal, but his laziness affected his attention to the tests.

His teachers said that he was working at well below his capacity. His grades ranged from average to below average. He had verbal and artistic abilities, but even in his best subjects, his performance was erratic, and whenever he could get away with it, he would plead some illness to avoid going to school.

Frances' anger at his laziness provoked temper tantrums. She took him to a clinic where a psychologist prescribed an extensive course of therapy, finding Kenny, a hostile child overly dependent on his mother, and suggested counseling for the mother as well. Frances declined. She hoped that Kenny would find himself. Maybe religion would take hold.

And so he spent six years at Holy Family Elementary School, where even the minimal tuition was a sacrifice for the Bianchis. Although he learned to read and write with superior facility, showing particular adeptness at what would now be termed creative writing, daily indoctrination in the precepts of Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church failed in their intended effect.

He took communion and made his confession weekly. He was taught about sin, its occasions and its consequences. He was told about four sins, crying to heaven for vengeance, willful murder, the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor and defrauding laborers of their wages.

a person committing any of these would have to make a perfect act of contrition to avoid eternal damnation none of this made any serious impression on bianchi he heard the words but they were mere words to him of no obvious and immediate use and in language as in life he did not separate the wheat from the chaff

In Christian terms, he remained unregenerate, a soul lost to God, rudderless on the voyage of life, a creature who caused weeping in heaven. In secular terms, he was the sort of child any experienced teacher would see was headed for trouble, but no one could have foreseen how much trouble he would be in and how much misery he would cause.

when he was thirteen his adoptive father died and frances went to work to support herself and her son at gates chile high school kenny dated frequently

approaching all the girls as he did Janice Duchong with prince-valiant courtliness. Considering the period in American life, 1966 to 70, he was remarkably clean-cut in high school, avoiding long hair and sloppy clothing, giving every appearance of a boy respectful, even emulative, of his elders. He joined a motorcycle club, but they were no Hell's Angels.

He had his right arm tattooed with the image of a motorcycle and the letters Satan's Own MC, although this he quickly regretted to himself.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. At 18, he married Brenda Beck, whom he had known since childhood.

the marriage lasted only a few months soured in part by his belief that brenda had been intimate before the union with another young man her being a nurse also made him nervous for he thought nursing an occupation dangerous for a married woman because it provided too many opportunities for illicit relationships and even encouraged them

Bianchi set high standards for his women, which they repeatedly failed to meet. His Catholic education served him here in a twisted way. He was able to confuse ordinary women with the Virgin Mary, and could be moved to bitter disappointment, even anger and fury at their human frailties.

denying female sexuality even as he was attracted to it he objected to v-neck sweaters and tight jeans and asked of women absolute fidelity in return for his outwardly absolute devotion yet he always dated several girls at once and did not require of himself comparable standards of purity

With Catholicism, as with other systems or bodies of belief, he was self-pleasingly selective. After his divorce, which he liked to term an annulment, he went on as before, wounded but persistent. He proposed to another girl, Susan Moore, but she told him that she could not consider him seriously until he learned to stay out of trouble and hold on to a job.

Neither was Susan Moore happy about Bianchi's chronic lying and his skill at it. She suspected that he was simultaneously seeing another woman, Donna Duranzo, and herself, although he assured Susan that his only interest in Donna was concern for her two children, especially her little boy, for whom he professed acute fondness.

The poor little kid, Bianchi would say. He needs a father. I know how he feels. My daddy died when I was thirteen, you know, and I never knew my real father. But twice Susan caught Kenny and Donna alone together, once in her apartment and once in his. His demands for both women's fidelity in the face of his duplicity created some heated confrontations.

One night, on the outs with Donna, he came to her apartment and she refused to open the door to him. He shouted at her in the hallway, then went outside to peer at her through a window. He demanded that she open the window and speak to him, and when she turned her back, he smashed the glass and started to climb into the apartment.

Donna fled out the front door and called the police, but she dropped charges when, at the police station, Bianchi seemed so contrite, so pitiful and polite, assuring everyone that he had not meant to break the window, only to open it, referring to the incident tenderly as a lover's quarrel.

Bianchi announced his intention of becoming a policeman as a start, he said, toward achieving some position of authority in life and to satisfy his urge to help people. To this end, he enrolled at Monroe Community College, taking courses in police science and psychology.

The first subject fit his vocational goals. The psychology courses fed his one consuming interest, himself.

Psychology also attracted him as an attitude to life more appealing than the harsh insistence of Roman Catholicism on personal responsibility for one's actions. He found in modern psychology an agreeable tendency to see man as victim of impersonal forces which could be explained but not really controlled.

man as acted on rather than acting but he attended classes only sporadically and through to form took advantage of the school's medical facilities complaining of migraine headaches and other afflictions when he did apply for a job with the sheriff's department he was rejected but he regarded this as a momentary setback blaming the nature of the test

Undiscouraged, he landed a job as the next best thing to a policeman: a security guard, a position that had the advantage of requiring no rigorous course of study. Another advantage of being a security guard was the excellent opportunity it afforded him to take what he felt belonged to him: the merchandise.

Bianchi was naturally light-fingered. He stole clothing and jewelry, showered girlfriends with looted trinkets. But his larceny, never proved but often suspected, forced him to change jobs often. An imposition he resented. His selective readings in psychology helped him to cope with dismissal, however.

providing him with explanations for his acts and failures. He had his needs. The urge to steal he compared to the urge to urinate, a build-up of forces which required release. If his employers fired him for theft, they had, in his view, suffered a failure to understand his needs.

For a time, he also worked as an ambulance attendant, gaining early experience with dead bodies, saying that the job met his need to help people. But hours proved inconvenient. He was going nowhere, and by 1973, the idea of California had begun to lure him.

At that time, he was working as a security guard at J.B. Hunter's department store and was pursuing Susan Moore, who also worked at Hunter's. She saw that he stole. When he would present her with costume jewelry, she would remonstrate with him and tell him that she even knew which counter in the store it had come from.

Yet she felt for him. She could see how bright and animated by dreams he was. Someone like Bianchi should not waste away his talents in an inferior position. He proposed marriage to her, but she resisted, telling him that he had to find himself, show that he was on track toward a steady life, demonstrate the reliability of a family man. Bianchi knew that he was in a rut.

His thoughts radiated elsewhere, away from Rochester, away from his mother. He imagined other worlds. New York City. Hollywood. Finally, at the start of the new year in 1976, he made his move. He would go to California in search of a new start, a better life.

Through his mother and aunt Jenny, he made contact with cousin Angelo Buono, who agreed to take him in temporarily.

In July, Bianchi found his own apartment at 809 East Garfield Avenue in Glendale, a convenient six blocks from Buono's, in a one-story U-shaped building resembling the California auto courts of days gone by, complete with palm trees. During the next year, Bianchi and Buono would grow ever closer,

and soon did almost everything together, especially when it came to women. They both had several girl friends at the same time, whom they lied and manipulated to their hearts content. The girls protested. They would sometimes beat them, and almost always dump them, before moving on to a new girl. There were also avid users of prostitutes.

When the girls in their life did not live up to their standards or did not act the way they wanted, they went out and picked up prostitutes who would act just the way they instructed. Buono had a particular love for anal sex, and it annoyed him that almost all his girlfriends refused to be anally penetrated.

But for a little extra cash, prostitutes would almost always happily offer up their backsides. One such prostitute was a black woman named Yolanda Washington. She never did anything to annoy Bono and Bianchi, but one of their girlfriends had annoyed them.

Bianchi wanted to kill the girl, but Buono said that this was a bad idea, as they would quickly be considered suspects. Instead, Buono suggested they get revenge on women in general by killing the, and here I quote, nigger whore they had found the other day.

They drove and picked up Yolanda, and while driving, Bianchi attacked her and put her in handcuffs. Then he raped her before starting to strangle her to death. He tried pulling back on her throat with his forearm first, then used a rag Bono handed him.

Even though handcuffed, she managed to kick Buono in the head, so he held down her legs, draped over the back of the front seat with his free hand, until Bianchi had finished the job. When she was limp, Bianchi surreptitiously removed the large turquoise ring from her left hand and slipped it into his pocket. He found it would make a nice present for his girlfriend.

Then Buono drove to a spot on Forest Lawn Drive, below the Oakwood Apartments he had once lived in. They dumped Yolanda Washington's body beside the road, near a rock pile, and the entrance to the graveyard, across the way from a Warner Brothers set depicting a peaceful New England village.

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And with that, we come to the end of part six in this series.

Covering the saga of the Hillside Stranglers. In two weeks I will bring to you part 7. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.