Kenneth Bianchi & Angelo Buono | The Hillside Stranglers - Part 7
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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 214.

I am your humble host, Samas Rosland Weyberg Thun, and this episode airs on the 25th of December, Christmas Day. So I would like to wish my dear listeners a very merry Christmas, God Jul, as we say here in the High North, and a happy New Year.

So sit back and relax, perhaps with some mulled wine and Christmas cookies, as I present to you the continuation of the tale of the Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. We left off last episode with the murder of Yolanda Washington. Our killer's background story is thus at an end. And now we continue where we left off two episodes ago.

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. Thanksgiving Week 1977 will be remembered as a true week of terror and horror in the history of Los Angeles.

No one, except Frank Salerno and a couple of other officers, had paid attention to similarities between the Judy Miller and Lissa Kastin murders, and as for Yolanda Washington, she had been dead for more than a month, and might soon have been written off as just another murdered prostitute.

But now, in a mere nine days, five more bodies, all of them nude young women or girls, turned up on hillsides in the Glendale Highland Park area, and connections among them were obvious to everyone. Buono and Bianchi's acts, though not their identities, had finally penetrated the consciousness of the city.

Not a morning nor an afternoon passed for the citizens without them being confronted in the newspapers and on radio and television with news of the killings. And the fear, even the certainty, that the hillside strangler, as Buono and Bianchi came quickly and collectively to be called, would strike soon again.

The term "Hillside Strangler" seemed to spring up spontaneously once police began referring to the "Hillside Murders", with no one able to claim sole authorship. Nor did police object to the use of the singular, though they were convinced that there had to be more than one strangler. The less the killers thought was known about them, the better.

In the city, women became afraid to drive their cars alone at night. Parents feared for their daughters. Self-defense classes for women multiplied. City parks were deserted. Sales of mace, tear gas, and guns exploded. Women debated what they would do if confronted by the strangler.

The options discussed was if it was better to try to run away, to fight, to scream, or to cooperate, so as not to make him angry. Some people thought that the stranglings were a message from God. Vengeance on a valueless city. The Times soon ran a feature story carrying the headline, The Southland's New Neighbor. Fair.

Such headlines and stories proliferated in all the media. They increased, of course, the fear they reported, but they reflected reality. No phrase could better describe the mood of the city then and for months to come than the title of the 1950 Richard Widmark film called Panic in the Streets.

On Sunday, the 20th of November, Sergeant Bob Grogan had planned an outing on his boat, but for him there was no possibility of deep-sea fishing that day. He mildly cursed when, reading the Sunday paper while his wife was off at Mass, he got the call to go immediately to the corner of Ranon's Way and Wawona Avenue in the hills that separate Glendale from Eagle Rock.

Had he known that he was embarking on what would become an obsession that would consume six years of his life, he would have cursed more vigorously. The area surrounding the crime scene was all twisty little streets among low hills, not the sort of place a killer could get away from quickly unless he knew it as well as his own neighborhood. The dead girl lay on her side under a small tree,

Opposite was a vacant lot, but elsewhere modest houses lined the streets. Had it not been a Sunday, the body would have been discovered earlier. Grogan arrived just after noon. Approaching the body, Grogan thought immediately of his own teenage daughter and tried to banish the thought. He noticed the ligature marks at the neck, wrists, and ankles. When a coroner's assistant turned her over, blood trickled from her rectum.

and Grogan had no trouble making deductions based from that. It was his belief, based on his investigations of scores of rape-murder cases, that the victims were often sodomized, and often so after the murder itself. Necrophilia, Grogan felt sure, was far more common a human activity than generally believed.

Because almost anyone would sooner admit to murder than to enjoying sex with dead bodies, it was a difficult crime to prove. Small bruises showed around her breasts, and then, examining her more closely, Grogan noticed something that made him think at first he was looking at the body of a drug addict: puncture marks on the inner arms.

But there were only two puncture marks, none of the usual scars and needle tracks of the addict. The rectal bleeding and the absence of the body of any obvious signs of a dissipated, druggy existence suggested to Grogan that she might have been tortured before, during or after the killing. Maybe all three. He stepped back and looked about.

He noticed no footprints or disturbances of any kind on the ground around her, and the body showed no signs of having been dragged. He concluded that she had been placed where she lay, probably by more than one man, removed from a car that had then sped off. But the driver must have known the neighborhood.

while grogan was writing up his preliminary report and speaking to the coroner's office that afternoon learning that no drugs had been found in the body a small boy was making another discovery

At about four o'clock, on the other western side of the Elysian Valley, Armando Guerrero, nine years old, was playing in a trash heap on a shadish slope, about fifty feet below the obscure little street called Landa. It was dark and damp and a little scary. A great place for a kid to sift through trash for treasures.

That afternoon, as the November light began to fail, Armando thought he spotted something unusual in the trash pile along with the old mattresses and bottles and cans. Armando saw two department store mannequins lying head to foot together amid the junk. The boy thought they would be great to take back home. He approached one, reaching down to tug at its foot.

But then he noticed a dark circle around the ankle, with ants feeding in it. Armando was frightened. He uttered a prayer to the Blessed Virgin and ran home to tell his brother. When the brother, Alonso, seventeen years old, touched the mannequins, he telephoned the police, saying that the mannequins were very stiff, but that he was afraid they were very real. He thought he had seen blood on them.

In fact, these were two little girls, so fragile, helpless, dead, rot working away at their faces. Through the greenish slime on one mouth, he saw blood-clotted braces on the teeth. He summoned LAPD homicide. It was Bob Grogan's partner, Dudley Varney, who examined the bodies. Sergeant Varney estimated at once that the girls had been dead for a week.

He noticed ligature marks, the absence of any clothes or jewelry, the smears of dried blood, the armies of ants.

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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Looking up toward Lambda Street, Varney speculated that the girls' bodies had been tossed from there and had rolled down onto the trash heap.

One man could have done the job, the girls were so small, but that seemed unlikely. Varney asked the boys whether they recognized the girls. They said no, but the older brother said that he had heard that two girls were missing from St. Ignatius' school. A poster had been distributed offering a reward for information about them. Varney checked and learned that the priest from St. Ignatius had distributed the poster.

offering an unspecified reward for information about them, showing their school pictures and giving descriptions of them. They were 12-year-old Dolores Cepeda, weighing 96 pounds, that's around 44 kilos, and 14-year-old Sonja Jansson, 4 feet 11 inches tall, weighing 80 pounds, around 36 kilos, and wearing braces on her teeth.

The girl Vani's partner Grogan had examined was identified the following afternoon. She was twenty-year-old Kristina Vector, an honor student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design, a highly respected school. Vani and Grogan compared notes on the three bodies and were in no doubt that the same killer or killers had been involved, probably two men.

If happiness is doing as one likes, Thanksgiving was a joyful season for Bono and Bianchi. Not only did they accomplish two fresh murders, they at last received the recognition they felt due them, publicity beyond their wildest dreams. The entertainment capital of the world was enthralled by their acts.

As they watched the news together, they took particular pleasure in learning that the media, and presumably the police, were crediting them with two or three murders they had not even committed, including a girl way out in Pomona. That Sunday, at the Eagle Rock Plaza, they had noticed Dolores Cepeda and Sonia Johnson boarding a bus and had decided to follow them.

The possibility of capturing both girls multiplied pleasurable anticipation. An orgy, followed by a twin killing. When the girls got off the bus on York Boulevard, Bono and Bianchi motioned them over to the car. Flashing their fake badges, Bianchi told the girls that a burglar was loose in the neighborhood. He was armed and dangerous. The girls had better accept a ride home from the police.

Dolores and Sonia, who had just stolen about $100 worth of costume jewelry from a shop at the plaza,

were anxious to cooperate for fear that their crime would be discovered, and at first, when they were told to strip down at Bono's quote-unquote satellite police station, they thought that they were being searched. It did not take long for them to realize that what they thought had been police officers were in fact the exact opposite. But by then it was, of course, far too late.

Buono and Bianchi, after getting their sexual fill from the girls, each of them raping the girls both vaginally and anally, murdered Sonia first in the spare bedroom. When they came into the living room to get Dolores, she asked plaintively, Where's Sonia? Buono told her not to worry, as she would soon see her again. The jewelry the girls had stolen was a great temptation to Bianchi,

But Buono was watching too closely, and made sure that it went into the dumpster, along with the girls' clothing and the jewelry they had been wearing. This included ceramic pins of unicorns, cloudbursts, rainbows, a thin gold-plated necklace with charms, a floating heart and a teddy bear. Bianchi happened to be driving his girlfriend's Mazda station wagon this time, and it proved convenient transport.

With the two bodies laid out in the back under a blanket, Buono directed Bianchi to the cow patch. It gave Buono particular pleasure to dump the bodies there, as it reminded him of childhood pictures. Then came Christina Vecler. They had driven over to Hollywood and observed the heavy concentration of police, and they knew that there were others undercover. They required something nearer to hand.

Bianchi, remembering Christina as a girl who had spurned him at 809 East Garfield, checked to see whether she still lived there by making an anonymous phone call to her. A few days later, on that Saturday night, with Buono waiting in the Cadillac, Bianchi knocked on Christina's door and, showing her his badge, said, and I quote, Hi!

Remember me? It's Kenny Bianchi. I used to live next door. How's it going? Listen, I'm a member of the police reserve now. See, they even give you a badge. I was just patrolling the neighborhood and I noticed your car. The VW, right? Well, wouldn't you know it. Looks like somebody's crashed into it. Right there in the parking lot. If you'll come out and help me, write up a report. It might help you collect on your insurance.

End quote. That was all it took. Having done everything sexually they could think of to Christina, finding themselves at the moment for murder, they agreed that they ought to try something different for the sake of experiment and to confuse the cops. Bono said he had just the thing. He fetched from his cigar box a hypodermic syringe,

that he had stolen from the hospital during a visit to his mother, filled it with Windex, a common glass and hard surface cleaner, and injected the fluid into both of Christina's arms and into her neck. The Windex produced convulsions and extreme, unimaginable pain, but Christina failed to die. So Buono came up with another idea.

He had recently bought a flexible gas pipe for a stove from Antoinette Lombardo at her parents' hardware store. The stove itself had not yet been purchased, so there was no difficulty in dragging the bound and gagged Christina up to the gas outlet in the kitchen, placing the pipe against her neck, slipping a vegetable bag over her head, and sealing the bag with the cord.

While Bono turned the gas on and off, off and on, Bianchi pulled on the cord. They reveled in watching Christina flail helplessly in pain and fear, and both had brought themselves to ejaculation by the time she finally died. By Monday, the joys and depressions of the Thanksgiving holiday worn off, Bono and Bianchi were ready to kill again.

They agreed that branching into new territory would be the smart thing to do, a way of avoiding and confounding the police. Buono suggested Malibu, then decided that would be too long a drive. He said he knew the valley well, and they settled on it. There were plenty of girls in the valley, that was for sure. They were cruising Sepulveda when Buono spotted Lauren Wagner getting out of her Mustang at a donut shop.

Buono liked red hair. They waited for her to drive off again and then followed her. They had their badges and the handcuffs, and this time Buono had stuffed a .45 automatic into his belt. Bianchi was driving the Cadillac. When Lauren turned onto her own street, Bianchi brought the Cadillac alongside Lauren's Mustang. Buono held his badge up to the window and pointed forcefully for her to pull over.

Bianchi got out and told Lauren they were going to have to take her in. When Lauren said that they would have to talk to her father, who was in the house just nearby, Bianchi dragged her out of the car and into his. She shouted that they would not get away with this. Back at the house, Buono won the coin flip.

and in the spare bedroom with him, Lauren told him that he had nothing to worry about. She liked sex, she said. She had spent hours in bed with her boyfriend that evening and was ready for more. When Buono passed her over to Bianchi, Buono said that this was the best one so far. She knew what she was doing. She enjoyed it. Bianchi would have a great time. Lauren, of course, had not enjoyed a second of the rapes

but she was an intelligent young woman and had reasoned with herself that her best hope was to try to cooperate as much as possible smart as that might be it did nothing to save her as with christina wechler buono suggested that they try something new he brought in an electrical cord from his shop pared away the insulation on one end

separated the wires, taped them to Lauren's hands, and plugged in the cord. As Lauren was electrocuted, causing burning and insane amounts of pain, she trembled and moaned behind her gag, but the shock did not kill her. Buono rewrapped her hands and tried again, repeatedly putting the plug in the socket and pulling it out, but again she refused to die.

Even though they found electro-torture to be fun, the cousins were sexually sated and wanted to get the job done. So they put a plastic bag over her head, put a cord around her neck, and strangled her to death. It had been reckless, they admitted to each other, to take the girl from almost directly in front of her parents' house.

Their car, the Times reported, was said to have been a black and white sedan, leading police to suspect that the strangler was posing as a policeman. They agreed that next time they would try an entirely new approach. The abduction should be made from a completely safe place. To everyone else this is a desk, but to you it's a launch pad. You're starting blood. Saying a desk? This is opportunity.

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. And with that, we come to the end of Part 7 in this series, covering the saga of the Hillside Stranglers. In two weeks, I will bring to you Part 8. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.