Hillside Strangler

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This article is about the murderers. For the highway, see Hillside Strangler (Illinois)

The Hillside Strangler is the media epithet for two men, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, cousins who were convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and killing girls and women ranging in age from twelve to twenty-eight years old during a four-month period from late 1977 to early 1978 in the hills above Los Angeles, USA.

1 Murders
2 Trial
3 Films
4 External links

[edit] Murders

On October 17, 1977, a prostitute named Yolanda Washington disappeared. Her naked body was discovered several days later at the Forest Lawn Cemetery near the Warner Brothers studio lot. She had been strangled.

On Halloween morning, October 31, 1977, police were called to an Eagle Rock neighborhood, north of downtown Los Angeles. The body of a teenage girl, wrapped in a tarp, had been found on a curb in a small residential area. There were insects feeding on her flesh. Bruises on her neck indicated strangulation. The body had been dumped, meaning she was killed somewhere else. The girl was about 16-years-old, weighing only 90 pounds (41 kg), and had medium length, reddish-brown hair. She went unidentified at first, but after hours of unsatisfying tips, the girl was finally identified as Judy Miller, a 16-year-old destitute.

On the morning of November 6, 1977, the nude body of another woman was found near the Glendale Country Club. Similar to Judy Miller, the killer strangled her with ligature and dumped her body. The woman was identified as 21-year-old Lissa Kastin, a local waitress. Lissa was last seen leaving work on the night before she was discovered.

On November 13, 1977, two school girls, Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, boarded a bus and headed home. They got off at their bus stop but were never seen again until, on November 20, a young boy cleaning up trash found 2 bodies. Both girls had been strangled and raped. They were soon identified as Cepeda and Johnson.

Later that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the nude, dead, sexually assaulted body of 20-year-old Kristina Weckler on a hillside near Glendale, California. Weckler was known as a stable, quiet, and contientious student who kept to herself. Unlike previous victims, this time there were signs of torture on the body as indicated by oozing injection marks.

Just before Thanksgiving, on November 23, the badly decomposed body of 28-year-old Jane King was found off an exit ramp near the Golden State freeway. She had gone missing 2 weeks earlier, around November 9. With the continued discovery of bodies in hilly areas, a 30-police-officer task force was formed to catch the predator who was deemed the "Hillside Strangler."

The killers took the weekend off for the holiday, but on November 29, another discovery announced their return. On a hillside outside of Mount Washington, police found the body of 18-year-old Lauren Wagner. She, too, was strangled with a ligature. There were also burn marks on her hands indicating she was also tortured. She was victim number 8. The law enforcement task force—Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Glendale Police Department—began to assume that more than one person was responsible for the slayings, even though the media continued to use the singular, Hillside Strangler.

With the arrival of December, the killings stopped for 2 weeks, but then a 9th murder took place. On December 13, 1977, police found the body of 17-year-old call girl Kimberly Martin strewn on a hillside, her body pointing toward city hall. Following this discovery, there were no more victims found in December or in January.

The final killing in Los Angeles was discovered on February 16, 1978, when a helicopter spotted an orange Datsun abandoned off a cliff in the Angeles Crest area. Police responded to the scene and found the body of the car's owner, 20-year-old Cindy Hudspeth, inside the trunk.

The Stranglers once stopped Catherine Lorre with the intent of abducting her, but after learning that she was the daughter of Peter Lorre, they let her go. It was only after the two men were arrested that Lorre realized whom she had met.

[edit] Trial

After intensive investigation, police charged cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr. with the brutal crimes. Bianchi had fled to Washington where he was soon arrested for raping and murdering two women he had lured to a home in the area for a house sitting job. Bianchi attempted to setup an insanity defense, claiming one of his multiple personalities committed the murders while he was in an altered, unconscious state. Court psychologists observed Bianchi and found that he was faking the illness, so Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against Buono in exchange for leniency.

At the conclusion of Buono's trial in 1983 the presiding judge Ronald M. George (now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California) said he would impose the death penalty without a second thought if the jury had allowed it. Bianchi is serving a life sentence in Washington. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, in Calipatria State Prison where he was serving a life sentence.

[edit] Films

The murder committed by The Hillside Strangler where the body was left near a 'No Dumping' sign was emulated by the killer in Copycat. The murders were the basis of the 2004 film The Hillside Strangler and Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders (2006), and a TV movie starring Dennis Farina, The Case of the Hillside Stranglers (1989).