Between October 1977 and February 1978, the bodies of ten women and girls between twelve and twenty-eight were found naked on the wooded hillsides around Los Angeles. They had been raped, sodomized, beaten and in some cases tortured, then strangled with a ligature and cleaned before they were dumped. The press called the killer the Hillside Strangler. There were two, cousins: Angelo Buono Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi.
Buono was born in Rochester, New York, on October 5, 1934, and grew up in California. He ran an upholstery shop in Glendale, and in January 1976 Bianchi, seventeen years younger, left Rochester to live with him. Buono became his model. Short of money, they first tried to force two teenage runaways to work for them as prostitutes. Then they began to kill. Posing as police officers, they lured women and girls into their car and drove them to the upholstery shop, where all but one of the murders were committed.
The dead were Yolanda Washington, nineteen; Judith Ann Miller, fifteen; Lissa Kastin, twenty-one; Jane King, twenty-eight; Dolores Cepeda, twelve, and Sonja Johnson, fourteen; Kristina Weckler, twenty; Lauren Wagner, eighteen; Kimberly Martin, seventeen; and Cindy Hudspeth, twenty. After two more deaths in December 1977 and February 1978, the killings stopped.
The investigation went nowhere until January 1979, when Bianchi, who had moved to Bellingham, Washington, was arrested for raping and murdering two young women there, and his past led back to Los Angeles. He tried to feign multiple personalities; court psychologists, notably Dr. Martin Orne, concluded he was faking. To avoid the death penalty he named Buono and agreed to testify against him, and Buono was arrested in October 1979. Bianchi pleaded guilty to five of the California murders and the two in Washington.
Buono pleaded not guilty. At the end of his long trial, in November 1983, he was convicted of nine of the murders, and in January 1984 he was sentenced to life without parole. The presiding judge, Ronald M. George, later chief justice of California, said he would not have had the slightest reluctance to impose death had it been in his power: "Ironically, although these two defendants utilized almost every form of legalized execution against their victims, the defendants have escaped any form of capital punishment." Buono died of a heart attack at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002, at sixty-seven.